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CDEOUGHT DEPOSIT. 



THE CHARN OF 

THE KIDDLE KINGDOM 




"A, Lord!" thought I, "that madest us. 
Yet saw I never swich noblesse 
Of ymages, ne swich richesse, . . . 
But not woot I who dide hem wirche, 
Ner wher I am, ne in what contree. 
But now wol I go out and see. 
Right at the wyket, yif I can 
See o-wher any steryng man. 
That may me telle wher I am." 

Chaucer's House of Fame. 



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PAGODA IN WESTERN HILLS, PEKING 
Frontispiece 



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THE CHARN 

OF THE 

KIDDLE KINGDOM 

JAMES REID MARSH 




WITH ILLUSTRATIONS 



BOSTON 

UTT3.E, BJ^.OWjN, AND COMPANY 

19 2 2 



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Copyright, 1922, 
Bt Little, Bkown, and Company. 

All rights reserved 
Published September, 19«2 



OCT -4 '22 

©CU68605'^ 






TO 

Jeannette Philups Gibbs 

AND 

Abthur Hamilton Gibbs 
without whose friendly counsel and encouragement 
this book would probably not have been undertaken. 



FOREWORD 

The lady was wearing a scarlet skirt with a 
very long coat of the same material when the 
boy first saw her. She was standing on the 
brink of the Grand Canon, watching the sun 
splash the stone battleship with every con- 
ceivable color, but mostly red, a hue only less 
brilliant than her skirt. The boy was on the 
brink of the Canon, too. He was prone on 
his stomach, dipping his head into nearly im- 
measurable depths, for he had just loosened a 
rock from the shelving where he lay, and was 
watching it fall, and afterwards, when it had 
merged with the reddish brown of the land- 
scape, listening for its impingement on the 
cliffs below. 

Finally, after his experiment, for it was an 
experiment and reminiscent of the days when 
he had wrestled with the vagaries of falling 
bodies, the boy stood up, his face aglow with ap- 
preciation of the rich panorama that stretched 
before him. He was standing perilously near 
the edge of the world, for that was what 
it amounted to. He could not have taken a 

vii 



FOREWORD 

fraction of a step without being savagely 
hurtled into space. And this it was that 
constrained the lady to speak to him. She 
had been waiting some moments, as if for him 
to turn of his own accord, for she was afraid of 
startling him with a word. 

Just as the boy turned she said, "The days 
of fairies are past, you know. It has happened 
before, — shelves crumbling away, I mean. If 
you want to prolong your journey, you had 
better keep away from the edge of things." 

The boy turned quickly, startled at the 
sound of her voice, for he had had no intima- 
tion of her coming. He reddened under the 
directness of her gaze and after what seemed 
to him an infinity of silence answered, "I 
suppose it was foolish of me. And as for my 
journey, that has scarcely begun. " 

"Then you are going far.^^" 

"Just underneath," he replied. And then 
he added, as if in extenuation of what he 
deemed a cryptic remark, "China. I started 
digging for it once, you know." 

Of course she did not know, but somehow he 
had felt immediately familiar with the lady. 
The boy could not understand why he should 
have felt this way; although the lady did. 
She had long cultivated the art of being 
familiar. 

viii 



FOREWORD 

"And you have decided to go round in- 
stead," she interpolated with a winning 
smile. 

"Yes," he answered. "You see a chum and 
I were only seven years old when we commenced 
digging, and I don't suppose we should have 
gotten farther down than a mile by now. The 
pit caved in on us one day, and that was the 
end of it. And now I am actually going there! 
It seems incredible." 

"Nor did I ever expect to," she countered, 
placing the top of her swagger stick between 
her pretty red lips and looking at him de- 
murely, with only the glimmer of a smile. 

"Then you have been to China!" the boy 
exclaimed with a kind of childish surprise. 

"Ummm," the lady replied, enjoying his 
consternation with every ounce of her feminine 
subtlety. "And I'm on my way back, too." 

"Then we shall travel together," the boy 
burst out with a frankness and spontaneity 
that were especially pleasing to the lady in 
scarlet. 

"That depends," she said, thrusting the 
swagger stick once more between her pretty 
red lips. "What boat are you taking.'^ Do 
you sail from Frisco?" 

"Yes, Frisco," he quickly replied, as if for 
that reason it must be by the identical steamer. 

ix 



FOREWORD 

"And the ship?" she asked, not a little 
impatiently. 

"Persia Maru," he replied, with his eyes 
fastened on hers. He must have been trying 
to divine the truth by the sober light that 
shone from them. Had he been a man and 
experienced in the ways of women he could 
have accomplished his task. It was scarcely 
necessary that the lady should speak. For 
the answer was written plainly on her face. 
In the end she laughed at the boy's confusion 
and said, "What wonderful luck!" 

"You have never been away from home 
before," she continued, rather than asked. 

"Oh, I have been on ships making voyages 
into the Caribbean," he answered carelessly. 
It was evident that he wanted to impress her, 
if he could, with his worldliness. But from the 
nature of her reply it was equally evident that 
he had failed to accomplish this very youngish 
desire. 

"I see I'll have to take you in hand," she 
said. "You can't go out there and break your 
legs like a colt that's put too early to pasture. 
Do you greatly mind if I try? I think I'll 
succeed. If there's a single word that comes 
to my mind more forcefully than any other it 
is tolerance. Be sure you understand before 
you condemn. Don't build your shell until 



FOREWORD 

you are sure what you want it to be. The 
average man builds his about thirty. Most 
women's are built by nature. So there you 
are. I think we had better be getting back to 
the train. It leaves within the hour." 

The boy had an impulse to thank the lady 
for all she had said to him, but when he 
considered that perhaps she had a lot more to 
say, and that there was to be a sufficiency of 
time permitted them on the ocean journey, he 
only acquiesced. They walked side by side, 
hardly venturing to speak until they reached the 
veranda, when she turned to him, put out her 
hand, almost impulsively, or so it seemed to the 
boy, and said, "This has been an extremely 
pleasant afternoon. You see, I am a sports- 
woman and have a reputation for picking win- 
ners. Of course, even wins may be flukes, and 
I have learned not to stake my last penny on 
anything, no, not even on character. But that 
is neither here nor there. I'll see you on the 
train. Perhaps it's not being worth your 
while. Yes.f* Au revoir, then. " 

The boy saw the lady on the train, but 
the talks they had there were not nearly so 
intimate as those that came later on the 
ship. 

Of course, there were a multitude of subjects 
on which the lady could only touch cursorily. 

xi 



FOREWORD 

After all, one can't, to use her very words, 
anticipate experience. 

"I simply want you to have a healthy 
attitude of mind," she would say. "You 
remember the old Latin proverb, ^ Sequi na- 
turam.' But how few realize what an extremely 
difficult art it is to follow nature, as if one 
were natural by instinct! The animals may 
be, and man undoubtedly once was, but the 
farther he gets away from the ones who lived 
in trees the farther he gets from the truth of 
the flesh, which, after all, is not the truth of 
the spirit. They are separate, don't you see. 
The reason animals make such a success of 
life is because they haven't spirits. They 
can't mix their drinks, so to speak, and get 
intoxicated with themselves. But ever since 
the garden of Eden man has been mixing his 
drinks and woman's too, and a sorry mess he 
has made of them! The summum honum of 
all my advice becomes, don't mix your drinks. 
You don't understand, do you? But you will 
some day. Never fear, you will. " 

The steamer had dropped anchor off Woo- 
sung, which is the place where the Yangtze 
widens one of its mouths before embrowning 
the sea. It was in the smaller hours of the 
morning and a big tender came down the river 
to take those disembarking at Shanghai to the 

xii 



FOREWORD 

jetty. The boy wanted to bid the lady good- 
by, but in the confusion of taking off baggage 
he had completely lost trace of her. 

He distinctly remembers standing near the 
after hatch of the tender watching the multi- 
tudinous lights of the liner blur into a nearly 
indistinguishable whole. Then he heard a big 
man grunt contemptuously. He looked down 
into the hatch, and there on a pile of tumbled 
mattresses he saw the lady in scarlet peacefully 
sleeping. There seemed to be no one else 
about, and unquestionably she had gotten 
there alone. But the boy cannot help recalling 
how he resented the contemptuous grunt of 
the big man near the hatch. For the lady had 
been true blue to him, and he will always 
remember her as she lay there, her long scarlet 
cloak gathered snugly about her form, her 
scarlet skirt, fringed with a brownish fur, just 
showing beneath the cloak, and her head bare, 
with the brown tresses flowing about her brow 
as they did that day near the edge of the 
world. 

In another instant she was gone, and the 
land of dreams had become a land of reality. 
If the boy has acquired any understanding of 
the world at all, he owes it in no little part to 
the lady in scarlet, and though she must, by 
the commonest courtesy, be forever nameless, 

xiii 



FOREWORD 

he hopes that this will come to her hand, and 
that she will feel that life has not been so 
utterly in vain as she might otherwise be 
tempted to believe. 



XIV 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

Pagoda in Western Hills, Peking . . . Frontispiece 

FACING PAGE 

Bund and consulates at Shanghai ....:. 6 

Mr. Ludwig traveling de luxe 6 

Pailow for Chinese woman who never remarried . 12 

Sikh Policeman 12 

A Lama temple 22 

Camel's back bridge 28 

WaUed-in homes and street 28 

A city blacksmith 36 

A street barber 36 

Templed roofs 46 

Terraced hills near T'ang Kang Tzu 54 

Farmer with odd plow-mates , . .54 

^-^ronze incense burner at Lama temple .... 62 

Emperors' tombs, Moukden 70 

Coffin borne through street 74 

Buddhist priests intoning for the dead .... 74 

An abandoned temple at Moukden 86 

Whirling devils . 86 

The girl outside the temple 94 

"Easy Street," Tientsin 98 

Temple of Confucius 98 

River scene, Tientsin 104 

Criminals on the way to be shot 104 

Market place with shrine 120 

A student, his wife and his aunt 120 

Temple of Heaven approach 126 

XV 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

Facing page 

The marble boat 126 

Porcelain pailow near the Summer Palace . . .130 
Looking toward Peking from the Western Hills . . 130 
Monument to Boxer victims, Russian Park, Tientsin 136 
Railway piercing the Great Wall at Shanhaikwan . 142 

A river pirate at home 150 

Ch'ien Men Gate, Peking 158 

In the heart of the Western Hills 158 

Cleopatra's Needles 164 

In the Baie d'Along 164 

The country of T'ai Nam 172 

A block of golden fruit 172 

A ruin left by the Boxers 182 

A farm house in the Mengtsz Valley 182 

Templed battlements of tombs 186 

The author in his garden 186 

Neighbors from India 194 

My dappled stallion who once was wild . . . . 194 

A group of little folk 204 

A Tibetan prayer wheel 204 

Chinese landscape from a mountain top .... 214 

Near the Valley of Fragrant Springs 220 

Shrine in the Valley of Fragrant Springs .... 220 

Jack Johnson and Chief Geronimo 234 

In a Mengtsz garden 234 

Cloarec, Lena, and the author, with Mimi, Cloarec's 

dog 242 

For many of the excellent photographs reproduced in 
this volume the author is indebted to his friend of China 
days, Albert P. Ludwig, of St. Anthony, Idaho. 



XVI 



THE CHARM OF THE 
MIDDLE KINGDOM 



THE CHARM OF THE 
MIDDLE KINGDOM 

CHAPTER I 

For seven centuries the charm and glory of 
the Middle Kingdom have dripped out of the 
eastern world like the light of early stars from 
the vaulted blue at night. Lily feet, almond 
eyes and sinuous black hair, with shimmering 
embroidered silks somewhere between, have 
stolen away and benumbed countless human 
hearts, as the poppy's juice is said to steal 
away and benumb the faculties of the brain. 
I, like so many others, have felt, "Romance 
is dead." And I have lived to chase it over 
the rim of the world, across the widest sea, 
until it stood and delivered. 

The big steamer coasts along Japan, touch- 
ing at the three principal ports. But somehow 
one fails to be impressed, though one is va- 
riously pleased, to be sure. Not until he is 
many hours out of Nagasaki does the traveler 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

begin to sense something akin to impending 
romance. As the ship sweeps over the conti- 
nental shelf of the most prolific country on 
earth he notices that the sea has taken on a 
soberer hue. Whereas before the waters were 
active, flashing green and white, with the 
waves curling over one another with a certain 
eternal resiliency, now they have become a 
deep brownish yellow, almost muddy. It 
seems that the great ship must momently dig 
her nose into the soft earth and be made a 
prisoner by this plastic moving mass. 

But the steel prow cuts vigorously on, 
though the waters are still, and when the 
traveler goes to the stern and looks into the 
wake, instead of beholding a frothy nectar 
whirling away to the sky he sees a heavy 
liquid angrily churning like a gigantic caldron 
of boiling mud. For China has not waited, 
like the Flowery Kingdom, for the world to 
come to her. China runs sixty miles out to sea 
to utter her sober warning. And the traveler 
leaning over the rail must heed it, though he 
have not a spark of youth in his blood. The 
great Yellow Sea descends on him like a 
prelude to an Oriental night, and he shudders, 
while his nerves tingle with the lust for things 
untried, for the subterranean places of the 
earth, where life is inverted, and where he 

4 



THE CHABM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

can gaze on the primeval passions of the 
world. 

By and by a junk more daring than the 
others flashes into view. She flits dangerously 
near the course of her iron sister out of the 
east. The captain of the big ship is mani- 
festly disturbed. There is a bawling of orders 
cut short by the deafening roar of the sirens. 
But the junk bobs out of reach as the modern 
leviathan plows her unchecked course. The 
traveler peers eagerly down into the faces of 
the little crew. He scans them as he would 
the pictures in a fabled story book. 

There is a rat-like running to and fro, a 
weird, unmusical, and yet not utterly un- 
musical chant, that by a stretch of fancy 
might be mistaken for a language, a hasty 
change of the course, while a group of rowers 
man the big sweep oar and with feverish haste 
sidle their craft out of the sucking maelstrom 
under the stern. For an instant, only an in- 
stant, the traveler glimpses the little yellow faces 
with the black braids wound around the tops 
of their heads like so many victims in the 
Adventure of the Speckled Band. Some laugh, 
displaying yellow teeth, only a shade less 
sallow than the skin stretching like drumheads 
over the hidden bones. Others make no effort 
to conceal the terror clutching at their hearts, 

5 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

for all are poor men, and the fear of death 
is heavily upon them. 

It may be only a fishing craft, or again it 
may be that the hold of the junk is heavily 
laden with the stuff that steals into men's 
brains, slowly atrophying the intellect and all 
the nicer faculties. For opium running is still 
the great adventure. Nor does the wealthy 
foreigner, whose gold has only accentuated his 
desire, hesitate to empty his coffers into the 
trade; for his name need never appear, and he 
can lounge over his coffee in a sumptuously ap- 
pointed club and mentally calculate his gain. 

But the great ship rushes on, and almost 
instantly the junk is dancing away to the 
windward, though now that she is out of reach 
of the devil from over the sea, one or two of 
her crew wave their hands, a barely distin- 
guishable fluttering like one shade of yellow 
over another less deep. In time whole fleets 
of junks spring into view. I purposely say 
spring into view because, what with the 
yellow of the sea and the yellow of the hulls 
and the sails, it is impossible to distinguish 
these craft until they are nearly upon you. 
The traveler feels himself growing impatient. 
His skin is delightfully a-tingle. China has 
already commenced to work her stupendous 
will, and the yellow waters are only an omen 

6 




BUND AiN'D CONSULATES AT SHANGHAI 




MU. LUDWIG TRAVELLING DE LUXE 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

of the yellow race, as if one should see green 
before catching a glimpse of some mighty jungle 
waste. 

The air grows heavy, too, and oppressive, 
in a sort of delectable way, with mystery, 
the mystery of the earlier centuries of mankind. 
The wind has died away and the only sound 
that breaks the silence of the deep is the 
occasional swish of the waveless sea as it 
falls away from the ship, gaining momentum 
for another quiet assault. The sky is a burn- 
ing yellow haze with the sun shining through 
it like an arc light through a mist of rain. The 
traveler has not yet changed his clothes. He 
is still wearing wool. But as he watches the 
indeterminate sun he involuntarily drops his 
fingers to the hem of his coat and rustles the 
cloth until suddenly he realizes that his hands 
are wet. Which reminds him that his collar 
is wilted. 

In a little while, perhaps about four in the 
afternoon, when the sun has dropped perilously 
near the earth and the yellow haze seems 
concentrated on the edge of the sea, a dark 
brown line, a wavy rushlike line, makes itself 
manifest just between the haze and the yellow 
waters. The traveler has never seen such a 
phenomenon before, but when he cudgels his 
brain he remembers crossing the Gulf of 

7 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

Mexico and suddenly seeing land come up like 
a reef hitherto submerged. He adjusts his 
binoculars and looks fixedly at the line until he 
sees it move, wave, as it were. And then he 
knows that this is land, that this is the shore 
of the Middle Kingdom. 

He inquires of a passing officer to sub- 
stantiate his find. And the officer tells him 
that their destination is far in behind that line 
of waving grass. So he must go still farther 
in! The Celestial Kingdom is only displaying 
itself by degrees. First came the sea, and now 
this line of brownish waving grass. What 
next? The pulse of the traveler beats faster. 
He feels the customs of the western world 
sloughing off him like the leaves of deciduous 
plants. He feels himself becoming a pagan, 
and he is prone to wonder just how completely 
the great forces of this older world will have 
him in their power. For it is a power that 
encompasses one on every side, as a break- 
water encompasses the sea. 

There is an escape, but like the escape from 
the breakwater, it is small, nearly invisible. 
But the traveler feels no regret that he cannot 
escape. He has come a long way and previ- 
ously made up his mind that his fingers shall 
clutch at everything, that even the minutest 
experience shall not pass him by. And in 

8 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

reaching this conclusion he has done wisely, 
for the mountain has never yet been known 
to come to Mahomet, and if Mahomet would 
penetrate the secrets of the mountain only one 
course is open. The ravines of the world are 
deep and inaccessible to all except those who 
abide in them and that other small company 
of gifted souls who have a vision of the 
ubiquitous nature of man. 

"I will cast this cloak from me and put on 
another," said the prophet Narma-khan, "for 
in this wise shall I deceive the king who 
believes that nothing is so interesting as the 
exterior of man. And in this he shows great 
wisdom. Otherwise he were not king." 

The great ship crept along, and I found 
myself not unlike my fairy traveler, who after 
all is not a fairy but every one who shows the 
wisdom of the prophet Narma-khan. I, too, 
felt the magic of the East creeping like Lethe, 
almost insidiously, into my bones. This expe- 
rience, which was to be the greatest one of my 
life, had already risen like Constantine's cross 
in the upper arc of the heavens. I, too, could 
see the writing on the wall, and shall I own 
that I was courageous enough, or should I say 
weak enough, to read? As I look back on it 
now and catch the glamor of the vision I must 
affirm that it was not owing to weakness. 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

Nor was it altogether a matter of courage, but 
rather one of destiny, which a man might as 
well try to avoid as to flutter upwards from 
the highest peak of the Alps. 

It was evening, and the sun had gone down 
in a quiet blast of heat, gone down to India, 
coasting along the further Himalayas, dipping 
into Turkestan and visiting every imaginable 
country the mention of whose name brings 
mystery and charm to literature and childhood 
and the blood of men. We had suddenly come 
in sight of one of the mouths of the Yangtze, 
the mighty river that is partially responsible 
for the Yellow Sea; for the silt and loess 
accumulated year by year are being contin- 
uously borne from the hinterland to be vomited 
into the unresisting deep. The steamer had 
come to anchor and I saw a variety of small 
craft of every conceivable color and design 
circling in and about the delta. A little way 
to the right, on the end of what appeared to be 
a peninsula, stood a beacon that burned 
steadily, sending a yellow glare over the mouth 
of the river and looking for all the world like 
the low-hung moon. The liner swung cease- 
lessly with the tide. Now we were pointing 
out to the Yellow Sea, as if we were home- 
ward bound, and now the swell of the under- 
tow seemed to push us silently toward the 

10 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

land. The gong rang for dinner, but I stood 
like one enchanted, trying to anticipate the 
future, delving deep into history and conjuring 
up New Arabian Nights and all the fairy lore 
of my fast receding infancy. 

It was with somewhat of a start that I 
noticed the inland sky ablaze with a whitish 
light. I had forgotten our port of disembark- 
ment. A sailor passed me, carrying a bucket 
of dirty water. I grasped him by the arm. 
He looked menacingly at me for a moment, 
grasping the edge of the bucket tightly as if he 
were half of a mind to dash the contents in my 
face. I was not of his kind, so what should I 
want with him.'^ Thus ran his reason. But I 
immediately pointed to the blaze of light in 
the distance. He followed my hand with his 
eyes and muttered (it sounded like muttering 
to me) a single word, or rather two sounds, — 
*' Shanghai. " 

I turned away from him like a flash. So we 
had arrived! And instantly I fell to wondering 
what lay under that silent blaze of light. For 
under the light was China. Not the Yellow 
Sea, not an isolated junk with its crew glower- 
ing far below me, not a line of waving brown- 
ish grass, but a great city teeming with 
countless humans; and these humans were 
Chinese. I recollected the manner in which 

11 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

the word had captivated my fancy. How 
could I eat? It was all I could do to restrain 
myself from hailing a passing craft and bargain- 
ing with it for a passage up the river. I 
afterwards found that I could have done just 
this. But I did not know it then, and anyhow 
it proved unnecessary when the big tender 
loomed out of the mists of the upper channel 
and shrieked three long whistles which were 
to be interpreted, "All those going ashore, 
stand at attention." I hurried below, for 
China was finally at hand. 

Shanghai burst on my view with all the 
glamor of Oriental imagery. The bund was a 
flare of lights, and although I had not ex- 
pected to meet with a landscape so partially 
European, still I was not altogether dis- 
enchanted of my dream. The jetty was 
crowded with sampans, or Chinese rowboats, 
the bulk of which clamored out to meet us, 
begging that we would drop our trunks over 
the side, and assuring us that they would 
fish them out of the river for the consideration 
of a few, oh, such a few pence. But my eyes 
were not for them. 

Straight ahead lay the bund; and up and 
down it in ceaseless flow was moving a strange 
humanity. Here and there I could make out 
the garb of a European but the bulk of them 

12 




PAILOW FOR CHINESE WOMAN WHO NEVER KK-MARRIED 




b 



SIKH POLICEMAN 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

were Orientals, and though this part of 
Shanghai, which is called the new city, is not 
so Chinesy, if I may coin a word, as the older 
and distinctly Chinese section, still it was 
different from anything I had ever seen before. 
There was an atmosphere about it distinctly 
Eastern, though not quite richly Oriental. 
The majority of the populace were shuffling 
down the street, quietly and orderly, and only 
the occasional bawl of a coolie broke the 
deathlike stillness. 

Every eye seemed to be fastened on the 
coming of the tender. Every heart beat in 
suspense until the companion ladder was 
lowered and the first group of passengers went 
down with mincing steps to the jetty. For as 
soon as the first man, who happened to be a 
woman, stepped on Chinese soil, a prolonged 
howl rent the night. The 'rickshaw coolies 
from near and far came racing down the 
streets, crashing into one another, dodging 
almost miraculously at times oncoming car- 
riages, and last, but by no means least, evading 
the stout cudgels of the towering Sikh police- 
men who are specially imported to strike terror 
into the hearts of the natives. 

One group of coolies bargained for the priv- 
ilege of carrying my trunks, another grasped 
at various parts of my anatomy and tried 

13 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

to shove me into twenty different vehicles at 
once. By a stroke of fortune I learned that 
my destination, the Palace Hotel, was only a 
few yards distant; so, giving my baggage into 
the hands of a native who was wearing the 
hotel livery, I started out into the city. But 
my 'rickshaw hounds pursued me to the very 
portals of the Palace. And even when I had 
set my foot finally within the door one fellow 
slipped up and grasped my arm in his clawlike 
hand, confiding in extremely broken English 
that there was another place only a mile away 
that was cheaper and every whit better than 
the "Pally 'Otel." 

But I was in no mood to venture farther, so 
I dodged inside and for the time being escaped, 
not only from my tormentors, but from nearly 
every trace of the Middle Kingdom. For the 
Palace Hotel was built for foreigners, and 
though the servants, with the exception of the 
Eurasian clerks, are all Chinese, I found myself 
in an atmosphere distinctly European. So 
much so, in fact, that bright and early the 
next morning I escaped to the Orient, which 
is only half a mile away and very dirty and 
smelly until one acquires the taste, which one 
seldom does. 

Shanghai is the city of every nation but the 
home of none, if, of course, we exclude the 

U 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

natives who, when they go abroad, are in- 
ordinately proud of the city of their birth. I 
was not to remain there permanently; in fact, 
I learned that I was not to be anywhere 
permanently, but a kind of rolling stone. But 
there is an advantage in being a rolling stone 
in China. One may not gather moss, — as if 
that were a commendable occupation! But 
one does gather experience. The customs and 
practices of the country vary like the spoken 
language, and to know China one must know 
all of it, for the cities are strangely provincial, 
and the villages are tombs. I did not know 
at once what my next movements were to be, 
nor did I greatly care. My chiefest concern 
for the moment, and, in reality, for every 
subsequent moment, was to plunge as deeply 
as I could into the life of the people. This 
was not so easily done as said. The language 
seems at first a nearly insurmountable barrier. 
Even now I have pleasure in recalling how 
that Chinese language first impinged on my 
auditory nerves. Should I ever be able to 
learn it? I feared not. In the first place it is 
sung and every one knows how difficult it is to 
distinguish words that are sung. I listened to 
the coolies bawling in the streets. I walked 
into the Chinese quarter where the merchants, 
in long blue cotton coats with their pigtails 

15 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

hanging to their heels, chanted their monoto- 
nous rigmarole. Little groups of men would 
cluster about them and stand listening with a 
sort of stupid stare on their yellow upturned 
faces, finally to shuflQe along to the next stall 
where perhaps a more brilliant lot of articles 
was on display. By and by, even during the 
passing of that first day, the language grew on 
my ears. It sang itself, as it were, into my 
subconsciousness. I went home that night to 
sleep, but there was no sleep. The language 
still was ringing in my ears. 

In the Chinese quarter are the great silk 
shops of the world; places where I first saw 
Chinese women of the better class, beautifully 
dressed, and moving about with ceremonious 
bows like so many people at court. The 
courtesy of the Chinese is always excessive, and 
at no time is it more advantageously displayed 
than when a wealthy patroness emerges from 
her almost maidenly seclusion to replenish her 
wardrobe. She is borne down the narrow 
streets in a richly ornamented chair. The 
curtains are dropped on all sides. No one may 
look upon her face while she rides. And even 
when she descends, a child servant, a little girl 
and virtually a slave, opens a silk umbrella 
with dropping sides and holds it over her head 
while the great lady picks her way with feline 

16 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

nicety into the shop. Her tiny feet twinkle, 
in their satin-shod simplicity. Her beautiful 
skirt parts below her hips, showing intermit- 
tently the even daintier garments underneath. 
Only the flesh of her hands is visible, and even 
her hands shrink into the ample sleeves as if 
they would hide themselves from the stare of 
the vulgar mob. 

But once inside all is changed. The parasol 
is shut with a rustle of shimmering silk, and 
the great lady exposes her peachbloom com- 
plexion with frequent glances to see that her 
,attendants are always near. She hangs her 
head modestly. Her black almond eyes turn 
their rich glow, vibrant with a consciousness 
of her beauty and charm, on her hands. The 
merchant addresses her with bowed head. He 
would not presume to gaze on her with desire, 
for how else could he gaze on a creature so 
charmingly rare? Eye evades eye and only 
when she finds the stuff that she has dreamed 
of during the vigils of her sleepless nights when 
she thought how best to captivate her lord 
anew, does she permit a smile to soften the 
arrested color of her features. She smiles and 
the merchant smiles, though still with bended 
head. Once again the little slave girl trots 
obediently before and the great lady, watching 
the little one's feet, follows in their path to be 

17 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

ensconced once more in the privacy of her 
palanquin and borne away to her home in the 
residential part of the city. 

It all was beautiful beyond description, and 
I was impatient of the day when I should know 
such an one as she, perhaps meet her in her 
home and linger with her in her gardens. But 
first I should have to learn the language of her 
lord. With him a look was not sufficient. It 
would be commonplaces, commonplaces, com- 
monplaces. And then when the spoken word 
began to fiow, when the nice phrase came at 
will, and I could sing my thoughts, then, 
thought I, I shall truly enter into a princely 
heritage. And the day did come, and I 
entered into my heritage. 

The streets were ablaze with signs of every 
conceivable color and length. I walked con- 
stantly under them, as if under waving banners. 
The way was narrow and not straight, which 
was an added source of pleasure, for one never 
knows what is coming next. At one of the 
gates, on the tops of carved and painted posts 
were two heads that struck me as being 
remarkably human. Not human-like, under- 
stand, but actually the heads of men. And so 
they were. They had been put there the day 
before as an example to the populace, and the 
populace looked once and did not look again. 

18 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

What were two lives in four hundred millions? 
The 'rickshaw coolie looked and chuckled. 
There would be more work for him. There 
were four less arms and legs to drag others 
through the streets. 

A huge Sikh policeman came down the 
middle of the thoroughfare, dragging three 
men behind him. The sight was indeed 
comical. For instead of grasping them by 
their arms, he had merely taken a twist on 
their queues and so held them in an excruci- 
ating bondage. They trotted meekly along, 
anxious to keep their pigtails slack, their backs 
bent nearly double like men about to commit 
a stealthy crime. I was the only one who 
noticed them. Poor men! Were there going 
to be three heads on the morrow? 

When I got back to the Palace Hotel I 
learned with delight that I had been ordered to 
Moukden to study the customs and the 
language. The picture of the beautiful lady 
danced before my eager eyes. I should have to 
leave Shanghai, but then Shanghai was alto- 
gether too foreign. The Chinese are a most 
adaptable people. They have to be to survive. 
I wanted old China with all its oriental 
glamor. I got it, a part of it, in Moukden. 



19 



CHAPTER II 

It was one of the anomalies of travel that I 
should cover the nearly two miles from the 
Yamato Hotel, which is a hotbed of Japanese 
imperialism, to the north gate of Moukden 
city in what once had been New York City 
horse cars. Now they were pony cars, and 
one felt all the thrill of a chariot race when 
riding in them. But before I came to the 
pony cars I came to the Yamato Hotel, a 
place which I was to know intimately by and 
by. For it became my custom to ride my pony 
down on Thursday nights and meet the trans- 
Siberian express. Every sort of political refu- 
gee congregated in the Yamato Hotel. And 
not all of them were of the masculine type. 
Not infrequently a gracious lady alighted from 
the train and, if one were sufficiently cir- 
cumspect, one might interview her in the 
upper drawing-room and exchange cards with 
her and badinage in pretty French which 
meant nothing but conveyed a great deal. 

I descended into Moukden on what would 
have been a tempestuous winter's night in any 

20 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

other country in the world. But in Manchuria 
the ground was snowless, and the deep vault 
of the heavens shone like an inverted porcelain 
bowl of exquisite blue. The blue was punc- 
tuated here and there by separate points of 
light which did not burn like the Pleiades in a 
warmer clime but shone with a sort of rigid 
warmth, like the smile of a beautiful but 
haughty woman. The engine panted as if for 
breath, and from far away came the singing 
of the telegraph wires as they stretched 
glitteringly in the starlight like cobwebs spun 
from silver. 

There was merrymaking in the hotel. But 
it was an international merrymaking. I saw 
huge Russians who by their dress exemplified 
the opening sentence of one of Kipling's 
powerful tales: *'Let it be clearly understood 
that the Russian is a delightful person till he 
tucks his shirt in." 

Some of them had their shirts tucked in 
and others were more picturesquely costumed. 
There was one enormous fellow for whom I 
conceived a nearly frantic admiration, the sort 
that a very small boy lavishes on the most 
noble man in the world. If he wasn't a spy, 
he had verily missed his calling. I am sure he 
was also once a duke, or a general, or some- 
thing equally exalted. I learned later that he 

21 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

was the confidential secretary of the consul. 
I knew there would be something secret 
about him. 

But the most magnificent part of him was 
his whiskers. I often remarked in conversation 
that he would have been worth his weight in 
Chinese silver, which is a very indeterminate 
stuff, in Hollywood. And I often entertained 
the idea of nominating myself a manager of 
one and transporting him to the center of 
movie-land. His manners were exquisite, and 
he could convey more impressions without 
saying a word than any person I have yet 
encountered. As a banker he would have 
been superb. As a titled personage none could 
have surpassed him. It was not until I had 
been some months resident that I learned that 
he was not so thoroughly Russian as I had 
first supposed. Kamaroff didn't even wear a 
shirt. His whiskers served instead, and true 
to Kipling's phrase, he tucked them in. 

Truly it was a motley crowd, and I don't 
know how many of my colleagues passed me 
by before one of them, noticing my signature 
on the register, approached and inquired with 
continental courtesy if I might happen to be 
that person. I lingered a while in the Yamato 
Hotel before striking off for the city, the heart 
of which was some three miles distant. My 




A LAMA TEMPLE 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

health was drunk so many times that night 
that Serruys, my Belgian colleague, was the 
only one fit to see me home. He was a tall 
splendid-looking boy who might have passed 
for his king. We bundled into our great coats 
and went into the night, seeking the pony cars, 
for they were quicker than 'rickshaws, and 
besides, one could derive no little heat from 
the steaming bodies of the natives, though I 
later learned to prefer the biting cold and the 
still fresh air. 

The Manchurian ponies are rugged little 
beasts standing some thirteen hands, and in 
the winter their coats are long and mangy like 
a bear's. They stood, the pair of them, leaning 
against each other to preserve the heat of their 
bodies. I saw the breath steaming from their 
nostrils as if they had been demons instead of 
poor, dumb little brutes, who nevertheless 
were as savage as their once wild prototypes. 
We clambered into the car, and when it was 
full, in the rush-hour sense of the word, the 
driver jangled his bell and lashed the little 
beasts into a frenzy of frantic speed. When 
the car had gathered its completest momentum 
I imagine we were traveling some twenty miles 
an hour, for in this direction there was a slight 
down grade and the ponies knew they were 
going home. The windows steamed and it 

23 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

was impossible to see into the night. I was 
stiff from my cramped position and the cold 
when finally we came to a grinding stop 
and alighted before the gates of Moukden 
city. 

Even at this late hour (it was near eleven 
o'clock, I should judge) a number of people 
were about. Hawkers were crying and bawling 
on all sides. Venders of food, carrying their 
stoves on their backs, clustered about the car, 
eager to dispense a sizable meal for a couple of 
coppers. Great shaggy dogs rose out of the 
uneven places of the street to growl and slink 
into the farther shadows. A child's wail 
coming from some distant hut, perhaps a half 
a mile distant, insinuated itself, as it were, 
into my consciousness. And before me the 
great city wall rose up, and for the moment it 
struck me that I was going into exile or into a 
sort of prison. For I and my colleague were 
the only whites about and consequently we 
flared, at least in our own opinions, against 
the pagan landscape. 

While the ponies were yet panting from their 
run through the winter's night we were safely 
ensconced in 'rickshaws, and in another in- 
stant had passed underneath the great north 
gate. A Chinese city is builded after the 
manner of their written character for a well. 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

health was drunk so many times that night 
that Serruys, my Belgian colleague, was the 
only one fit to see me home. He was a tall 
splendid-looking boy who might have passed 
for his king. We bundled into our great coats 
and went into the night, seeking the pony cars, 
for they were quicker than 'rickshaws, and 
besides, one could derive no little heat from 
the steaming bodies of the natives, though I 
later learned to prefer the biting cold and the 
still fresh air. 

The Manchurian ponies are rugged little 
beasts standing some thirteen hands, and in 
the winter their coats are long and mangy like 
a bear's. They stood, the pair of them, leaning 
against each other to preserve the heat of their 
bodies. I saw the breath steaming from their 
nostrils as if they had been demons instead of 
poor, dumb little brutes, who nevertheless 
were as savage as their once wild prototypes. 
We clambered into the car, and when it was 
full, in the rush-hour sense of the word, the 
driver jangled his bell and lashed the little 
beasts into a frenzy of frantic speed. When 
the car had gathered its completest momentum 
I imagine we were traveling some twenty miles 
an hour, for in this direction there was a slight 
down grade and the ponies knew they were 
going home. The windows steamed and it 

23 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

was impossible to see into the night. I was 
stiff from my cramped position and the cold 
when finally we came to a grinding stop 
and alighted before the gates of Moukden 
city. 

Even at this late hour (it was near eleven 
o'clock, I should judge) a number of people 
were about. Hawkers were crying and bawling 
on all sides. Venders of food, carrying their 
stoves on their backs, clustered about the car, 
eager to dispense a sizable meal for a couple of 
coppers. Great shaggy dogs rose out of the 
uneven places of the street to growl and slink 
into the farther shadows. A child's wail 
coming from some distant hut, perhaps a half 
a mile distant, insinuated itself, as it were, 
into my consciousness. And before me the 
great city wall rose up, and for the moment it 
struck me that I was going into exile or into a 
sort of prison. For I and my colleague were 
the only whites about and consequently we 
flared, at least in our own opinions, against 
the pagan landscape. 

While the ponies were yet panting from their 
run through the winter's night we were safely 
ensconced in 'rickshaws, and in another in- 
stant had passed underneath the great north 
gate. A Chinese city is builded after the 
manner of their written character for a well. 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

There is a big north gate as well as a httle 
north gate, and so on. The big north gate runs 
through to meet the big south gate, so that 
if it were not for the various towers rising out 
of the middle of the city one could have an 
unobstructed view from one wall to the other. 
We wound in and out of numerous side streets 
and alleys. 'Rickshaw men do not believe 
that a straight line is the shortest distance 
between two points. They prefer to wind 
about. They abhor long vistas. In their 
opinion it takes too long to come to the end 
of them. 

Inside the walls the city lay asleep. Occa- 
sionally a soldier rose out of the sheltering 
shadow of a dwelling and challenged us. The 
governor himself had once been a robber baron. 
He knew their ways and after dark it was 
worth a native's life to be abroad. But our 
answer, or rather my colleague's, that we were 
students of the Customs College, invariably 
let us by. At the great south gate, however, 
we were not so fortunate. Serruys had for- 
gotten the monthly pass issued by Chang 
Tso-lin. So there was need for bickering of 
an extended nature. I shall never forget how 
Serruys talked to the officer who insisted that 
we should not go out of the city. I later 
learned that the bulk of the talk was swearing. 

25 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

I was relieved to learn this, for it distinctly 
sounded that way. 

Finally we got through and came into the 
great south quarter of the suburbs. This was 
to be my home for many, many months, while 
I wrestled with the quite unparalleled idiosyn- 
crasies of the spoken and written tongues. 
The city outside the gates is not unlike the 
city inside, except perhaps that it is more 
ragged and topsy-turvy and smelly. There was 
no one about in these outskirts. It was like 
another Pompeii, except that on the morrow 
it would be resurrected and life begun anew. 
The streets were excessively narrow. In places 
I could have reached out my hand and touched 
the walls of the houses with my fingers. For 
in China every house has its encircling wall 
and the streets are like so many passageways, 
the only opening off them being other streets or 
doors into solid masonry. 

The routine of life goes on in China about 
the same as anywhere in the world. But 
there is a great deal that is not routine, that is 
in the highest degree spectacular, and though 
I was not forever falling into a sort of tempes- 
tuous fairyland, there were times, and a suflB- 
ciency of them, when life was surfeited with 
excitement. My home was an old palace of 
one of the native princes. Here I resided with 

26 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

my seven colleagues, all European, and all, 
like myself, being initiated into the language. 
We were fortunate in being so well appointed, 
for the governor considered it his duty to make 
us his guests from time to time. In this way 
we were introduced to the intimate workings 
of the political regime. 

I was barely settled before the tenth of 
October came around and with it the celebra- 
tion of the birth of the greatest republic on 
earth. The governor, Chang Tso-lin, had 
conceived the idea of making a fairly festive 
occasion of this day. And the fates connived 
at his scheme. The city was a riot of color and 
pageantry. The gay uniforms of the soldiers 
contrasted sharply with the blue of the citizens, 
not to mention the gorgeous silks of the gentler 
sex and the quite heterogeneous costumes of 
the children. 

Every imaginable hue was in evidence. One 
lady was wearing a handsome sea-green coat 
and shoes of a like brilliancy. Her hair was 
done in the fantastic Manchu style with little 
peaks and gables and whirligigs. On further 
glance I saw that she was exceedingly beauti- 
ful, and that she was the center of an admiring 
throng who now advanced and now receded, 
depending on her propinquity. She was tall 
and stately and very unlike the women of the 

27 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

south. I could only imagine the ripened curves 
of her form from the suppleness of her move- 
ments. She moved slowly, yet with an ex- 
quisite grace. Breadth of stride was suggested 
rather than openly practiced. It was as if she 
felt the consciousness of her womanly charm 
and yet disdained to show it in the open street. 

Her complexion was flawless, like the com- 
plexions of Manchu children. Her cheeks were 
firm though exquisitely molded over the bones 
which were high and pronounced, showing her 
Tartar ancestry. She was so different from 
the little lady of Shanghai! But at the same 
time I could detect the same matchless mod- 
esty, the identical glow of the blue-black eyes 
which shone with a kind of restrained coquetry. 

It struck me that her life was being held in 
abeyance, but would she have been so beauti- 
ful if this were true? I think not. No wonder 
that the men who ruled the Middle Kingdom 
invented concubinage, which is only another 
name for the love that often did not come with 
marriage. In China matches are by no means 
made in heaven. Can any man fall in love 
with any woman.'' An old sage asked that 
question, and though he did not dare put his 
answer in writing, he was known to have 
moved his head cross wisely. In this way he 
gave a silent sanction to love. 

28 




^.i>3?^1?^ 



camel's back bridge 




WALLED-IN HOMES AND STREET 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

In Peking, not so far from the Western Hills, 
where the emperors used to play in the summer 
time, there is a camel's-back bridge. Beneath 
are the iridescent lotus. And far beneath the 
lotus leaves, down deep where the light of the 
sun is unknown, reside the souls of princesses 
who found not love but death. For here they 
came in the stillness of the night when the 
Tartar moon made shadows on the water, 
and here they wept and donned white silks 
and let themselves fall gently beneath the 
shimmering surface. 

The crowd surged and I felt myself being 
borne irresistibly along. There was a blare of 
trumpets and people scattered out of the 
thoroughfare like autumn leaves caught up 
by a wintry wind. They seemed to swirl 
themselves hither and thither as the mounted 
soldiers came riding furiously by. These were 
only a prelude to the procession. By and by, 
down near the great drum tower, I could 
distinguish a cluster of floating banners, and 
within the banners I could visualize the little 
man whose name once had been a household 
terror throughout the countryside. It was like 
the old story of taking the bad boy of the 
gang and making him leader to cure him. 
Chang Tso-lin did not plunder openly any 
more, but what need has a king for plunder? 

29 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

It should be easy to be happy if you are rich; 
though wise men have quoted differently. 

Though I had seen pictures of the former 
robber chief and had him described to me, 
this was to be my first glimpse of him in the 
flesh. He was riding a cream-colored pony 
whose tail barely swept the ground, and one 
could tell at a glance that the little governor 
was a superb horseman. He looked neither to 
the right nor to the left. He merely sat like a 
statue while the pacing pony bore him statelily 
by. The crowd upturned their faces. There 
was admiration and fear depicted in every 
countenance. What would I not have given to 
have seen the lady in green just then! Did 
she apply for one of his glances, or was she 
content with the lord that fate had assigned 
her.f^ But the governor rode impassively on. 
His face was set with a thoughtful sobriety, 
though there was humor in his eyes, the sort 
of humor that deals death while it smiles. 

He had just gotten a hundred feet below me 
when there came a blinding flash, succeeded 
by a roar out of a doorway on the other side 
of the street. Immediately the crowd became 
a mob. There was a wild scramble, an out- 
burst of cries, the shrieks of women mingling 
with the bowlings of dogs and the execrations 
of men. And through it all the mounted 

30 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

soldiers rode like mad. An attempt had been 
made on the life of Chang Tso-lin. Some one, 
perhaps the father or brother of one whose 
head had been lopped off outside the city- 
walls, was seeking the great revenge. But the 
little governor bore a charmed life. There was 
a hurtling of limbs, human ones, and burnt 
clothing through the air, and a cloud of thick 
gray smoke that seemed to fall upwards, so 
slowly, ponderously did it move. Then all 
was silent again. 

Being a foreigner, I could get near to the 
scene of disaster, for there had been disaster, 
even though the little man on the cream- 
colored pony had flitted away like a dissolving 
cloud. The poor wretch who would have 
hurled the bomb had not calculated on the 
height of the door lintel over his head. He 
had raised the instrument of death in both 
hands, thinking to hurl it far across the street. 
But the metal sphere had collided with the 
top of the door frame, and the bomb, rebound- 
ing into the dwelling, had exploded with 
terrific force. 

Eighteen persons, or rather the remnants of 
them, were identified before sundown. It was 
a ghastly affair, and only a single evidence of 
the slumbering antipathy of the mass for its 
rulers, an antipathy that seldom comes to 

31 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

aught, but when it does is so horrible, so 
fiendish — as only Orientals can be fiendish — 
that it strikes terror not only into the hearts 
of those against whom malice is directed but 
even into the hearts of the criminals them- 
selves. 

Chang Tso-lin had escaped to the Japanese 
consulate. Once more his dexterous horseman- 
ship had saved him, and on the morrow the 
incident was forgotten. For life is stern in 
these Eastern lands. Action crowds action 
with surprising frequency. And though there 
is the old eternal repetition of eating and 
drinking and sleeping, there is also that which 
stirs even the breasts of the old and causes 
the mothers to cuddle their infants frantically 
to their bosoms. There is also that which 
makes the blood of the strongest warrior pale 
with fear. 

We got to talking about Chang Tso-lin that 
evening, and from talking about the little 
governor we naturally drifted on to robbers. 
Manchuria is infested with red-bearded fellows, 
as the natives colorfully term them. My old 
teacher cautioned me not to go too far from 
the city. "They might capture you," he said. 
And then I reflected that there might be no 
little wisdom in his words, for a foreigner 
should be particularly precious in their sight. 

32 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

They could demand a handsome ransom for a 
foreigner. When I asked my old teacher more 
about the matter, he confided to me, not with- 
out a serious light in his eyes, that there was a 
notion common among the country folk that 
if a man could make his executioner laugh the 
sword would fall harmless by his side. On 
hearing this I at once implored the old gentle- 
man to tell me a number of anecdotes that 
might possibly make an executioner laugh. I 
wanted to put into practice that new adage 
of safety first. But the old teacher waved his 
yellow hand in front of his yellower face as 
much as to say, "You can't depend on hear- 
say, you know." He believed in myths but 
like a practical Son of Han he would not 
risk his life for them. 

Most of the robbers are ex-soldiers who 
have not been paid, and, having guns, they 
set out to be their own paymasters. It must 
be a lucrative business, and it is much safer 
than going a-begging. For in the case of 
going a-begging you are at the mercy of your 
constituents, whereas in the other you hold 
the upper hand. It is a criminal offence for a 
citizen to have a firearm, so plundering de- 
fenceless villages does not call for excessive 
courage. Where courage is lacking there is 
usually an inordinate amount of cruelty, and 

33 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

the farmers suffer untold woes at the hands of 
these ruffians. But the Httle governor lops off 
their heads as fast as they are captured. It 
will be a sorry day for him if ever the tables 
are turned. 



34 



CHAPTER III 

The upshot of our conversation about the 
robbers was that I should meet Ferdinand 
Berteaux, French Consul at Moukden, who, 
Serruys confided to me one day, had a Belgian 
army pistol for sale. It turned out to be a 
lovely weapon of blue steel and I got it for 
about one-third its value. In this manner I 
came to know Ferdinand Berteaux, Chinese 
savant and art connoisseur, just such another 
person as Henri Allegre whom Conrad portrays 
so picturesquely in "The Arrow of Gold." 
He knew the Chinese thoroughly, one felt. 
Added to a naturally penetrative mind was 
that delightful French characteristic of emo- 
tional aloofness. I questioned Ferdinand Ber- 
teaux as to all sorts of things. And always I 
got an illuminating answer, cool, incisive, and 
sometimes nearly cruel. He had been leading 
the solitary life for eight years. Things were 
no longer what they seemed, but what they 
were. 

Nearly every week, on Saturday nights, he 
invited Serruys and me to a famous Chinese 

35 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

restaurant. It was our custom to go early and 
leave early. The consul had arranged his life 
with fastidious care. Usually he arrived just 
a little after us, the pockets of his greatcoat 
bulging with wines — red, white — and always 
the most delectable champagne, which he did 
not taste himself but forced unsparingly on us 
and on any of the Chinese attendants whom 
he could induce to drink. 

The dinners were sumptuous affairs. Ordi- 
narily we ordered a Peking duck. We always 
ordered the duck first, because it is good 
Chinese custom to permit the patron a view 
of the bird while it lives. The native, who 
took great pride in serving us from week to 
week, was wont to drive in a big fellow for 
our special delectation. He made the poor 
duck do his paces like a race horse. He 
pinched him to make him quack, and he 
flopped him on his back to show us with what 
celerity the big fellow could right himself. 
It was always the same. Week after week 
this duck would entertain us and week after 
week we would send him away and call for a 
less athletic, more ponderous, fatty fellow. I 
believe now that this big duck was a trained 
bird. No doubt he still is amusing foreign 
patrons. 

Once the duck was ordered, the consul 
36 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

would turn to me and ask what my fancy 
preferred. I had conceived quite a taste for 
sharks' fins, so invariably I called for them. 
Now let it be known from the outset that 
sharks' fins are a delicacy in the strictest 
sense of the word. When cooked they form a 
sort of gelatinous stringy mass, but quite 
without the prevailing quality of strings. 
They dissolve readily on the tongue, do not 
lodge in the throat, and yet can be chewed, if 
one feels so inclined. The soup from them is 
really delicious, not oily like that made from 
chicken, but somehow clean and smooth, like 
warm wine. 

In addition to the aforementioned delicacy, 
we had bamboo shoots, birds' nests, pickled 
onions, what, for want of a nicer term, I shall 
call deteriorating eggs (for these last one has 
to acquire a taste), a delicious bacon sweetened 
in syrup, and a veritable host of smaller 
dishes. Tea, of course, was brought in first. 
And then followed watermelon seeds. I can 
fancy if watermelon seeds were hors d'oeuvre 
that one would have to eat a bushel of them 
to whet the palate. I used to sit with quite 
childish admiration in the private restaurants 
watching the geisha girls manipulate these 
seeds. It would seem that they were able to 
keep a constant stream of them passing into 

37 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

their mouths. They served a purpose, however. 
Whenever conversation lagged one could always 
busy oneself with a seed. I found that under 
propitious circumstances I could eat about 
three an hour. Husking a dried watermelon 
seed with the teeth is an art beside which the 
use of chopsticks is mere child's play. 

I had been only a little while in Moukden 
before I began to hear strange things, among 
which the destruction of girl babies figured 
prominently. Ferdinand Berteaux should know. 
So I asked him. "Was it really true. f^" I asked. 
I shall never forget how he looked at me with 
his cold sparkling eyes. Was he laughing at 
my credulity.^ No. For he bowed his head 
with a certain awful finality, as if I had found 
him out in a practice of which he would rather 
have me ignorant. Even then I could not be- 
lieve what he later had to say. But his phi- 
losophy was overpowering. In the end he 
gained my consent. 

"You see," he said, "there is no alternative 
in a civilization such as this. It is man made, 
and it has gone man mad. A father finds that 
he has brought more mouths into the world 
than he has food to feed. What can he do but 
destroy? And having determined on destruc- 
tion, whom shall he kill.f^ Obviously what he 
conceives to be the passive principle in life, 

38 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

would turn to me and ask what my fancy 
preferred. I had conceived quite a taste for 
sharks' fins, so invariably I called for them. 
Now let it be known from the outset that 
sharks' fins are a delicacy in the strictest 
sense of the word. When cooked they form a 
sort of gelatinous stringy mass, but quite 
without the prevailing quality of strings. 
They dissolve readily on the tongue, do not 
lodge in the throat, and yet can be chewed, if 
one feels so inclined. The soup from them is 
really delicious, not oily like that made from 
chicken, but somehow clean and smooth, like 
warm wine. 

In addition to the aforementioned delicacy, 
we had bamboo shoots, birds' nests, pickled 
onions, what, for want of a nicer term, I shall 
call deteriorating eggs (for these last one has 
to acquire a taste), a delicious bacon sweetened 
in syrup, and a veritable host of smaller 
dishes. Tea, of course, was brought in first. 
And then followed watermelon seeds. I can 
fancy if watermelon seeds were hors d'oeuvre 
that one would have to eat a bushel of them 
to whet the palate. I used to sit with quite 
childish admiration in the private restaurants 
watching the geisha girls manipulate these 
seeds. It would seem that they were able to 
keep a constant stream of them passing into 

37 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

their mouths. They served a purpose, however. 
Whenever conversation lagged one could always 
busy oneself with a seed. I found that under 
propitious circumstances I could eat about 
three an hour. Husking a dried watermelon 
seed with the teeth is an art beside which the 
use of chopsticks is mere child's play. 

I had been only a little while in Moukden 
before I began to hear strange things, among 
which the destruction of girl babies figured 
prominently. Ferdinand Berteaux should know. 
So I asked him. "Was it really true. f^" I asked. 
I shall never forget how he looked at me with 
his cold sparkling eyes. Was he laughing at 
my credulity? No. For he bowed his head 
with a certain awful finality, as if I had found 
him out in a practice of which he would rather 
have me ignorant. Even then I could not be- 
lieve what he later had to say. But his phi- 
losophy was overpowering. In the end he 
gained my consent. 

"You see," he said, "there is no alternative 
in a civilization such as this. It is man made, 
and it has gone man mad. A father finds that 
he has brought more mouths into the world 
than he has food to feed. What can he do but 
destroy .f^ And having determined on destruc- 
tion, whom shall he kill? Obviously what he 
conceives to be the passive principle in life, 

38 



i 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

the negative rather than the positive. And 
this he takes to be woman, merely because she 
is passive, as all the world knows; passive so 
long as her mate pursues her, but becoming 
pursuer the moment he slackens his attention. 
And so the little girls have had to go. It is 
unfortunate, but it is inevitable. Of preven- 
tion they have no knowledge. All their rem- 
edies are curative. After all, is the seed more 
precious than the fruit, in the Deity's eyes, I 
mean.f*" Thus spake Ferdinand Berteaux. 

Still it seemed utterly without the bounds of 
imagination. So the consul invited me to stay 
at his home for an evening. The consulate 
was within sight of the Temple of Fertility. 
Here unfortunate mothers might bring un- 
fortunate children, deposit them, and slink 
away in the darkness. Hardly were they gone 
before gaunt forms rose up from the dark 
places of the streets. The dogs were ravenous 
as wolves. They were wont to feed on their 
own kind. Why should they hesitate to feed 
on human flesh .^^ 

It chanced to be a beautiful night. The 
consulate was on the outskirts of the eastern 
part of the city. Just beyond stretched the 
open country. The Manchurian moon stood 
high in the cobalt heavens. The brown 
expanse of the farmlands was dotted with 

39 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

graves, multitudinous conical mounds heaped 
with red earth that glittered strangely in 
the moonlight. The city was apparently 
asleep. After a time (we were sitting in the 
consul's luxuriant garden) the mystery of the 
night commenced to work its will. I felt tired 
and heavy, like one who is surfeited with rich 
foods. The consul told me to go and lie down 
a while. He had writing to do. He would 
call me when I should come. A servant was 
posted, watching the Temple of Fertility. 

The magic of the Oriental night was still in 
the air when dawn streaked the vaulted blue 
with her roseate finger. The consul had 
aroused me. We went through the gardens, 
following in the tread of a servant who was 
clothing himself as he walked. When we 
reached a corner of the garden the native 
separated the hedge with his fingers and 
pointed silently at a figure crouching before 
the little shrine. It was difiicult to make out 
the sex of this person. But from the manner 
in which the white-swathed bundle lay in arms, 
we guessed that it was a woman. 

She deposited the bundle lightly on the 
cold stone and hastened away. All was as 
silent as death for a moment, or perhaps it 
was much more than a moment. Then a 
little wail broke on our ears, low and pene- 

40 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

trating like the gurgle of falling water. A 
gaunt shadow rose up from the opposite wall 
and slunk templewards, seeking with terrible 
certainty its human prey. 

Perhaps Ferdinand Berteaux anticipated some 
desperate action on my part, for I felt his 
long flexible fingers tighten on my arm. But 
this did not prevent me from drawing my 
blue steel pistol from my pocket and taking 
a cool deliberate aim at the shadow now 
almost directly opposite. The consul had no 
intimation of this. The pistol cracked pleas- 
antly on the still night air; the shadow reared 
itself with a barely audible whine of pain and 
fell limply down. In another moment I had 
gone over the hedge and was stooping near 
the little bundle in white. We must have 
made a remarkable group: the shrine, myself, 
and the child. I could see nothing distinctly. 
I only felt warmth and movement against 
my hands. 

The consul chuckled a sort of desperate 
chuckle when I lifted the bundle towards him 
over the hedge. '^Le prenez!" he said to his 
native. And when I felt the barely perceptible 
weight gone from me I snaked myself into the 
garden. I was flushed with the exultation of 
victory, though I almost immediately hung my 
head as if ashamed for what I had done. 

41 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

"It will cost you twenty -five dollars," the 
consul said with a mock seriousness. 

"Twenty -five dollars?" I echoed, with all 
the breath I then had at my command. 

"The mission will take it for that amount, 
and keep it and clothe it and feed it, and 
finally turn it into the world again to be 
married and beaten." 

I could say nothing, so the consul went on. 

"Yes, for a time, even the mission folk 
stationed a man near here to do as you have 
done. But money is not illimitable nor is the 
capacity of houses. I, who do not believe in 
such things, am already supporting ten. But 
you will not do it again. You will learn to 
avoid such sights. In China sights act like 
fits of anger. They ruin one's temperament." 

What the consul said was only too true. 
But I deposited my little girl, who, by the 
way, was blind (an essential cause of her 
abandonment), with the good mission folk 
who perhaps may find a better use for her 
than turning her back to her own. 

And from that day on I did avoid sights, 
though in China one cannot help seeing things. 
But though I was later to see men chivied by 
tigers, I don't think anything quite affected 
me the way the sight at the Temple of Fer- 
tility did. It was experience, and it brought 

42 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

to my mind an all too sober truth. On the 
other hand, it was not altogether unreasonable. 
Necessity is often a cruel teacher, and nowhere 
more uncompromising than in the Middle 
Kingdom, where life is cheap, and where a 
man has not earned a right to it until he is 
ready to lay it down. 

I must thank Ferdinand Berteaux for many 
things, unpurchasable gifts, as it were. But 
I must thank him particularly for introducing 
me to the niceties of food. Because I acquired 
a taste for edible extravaganzas I made prog- 
ress with the language. And because I made 
progress with the language I became intimate 
with the people. And what connection, pray, 
has eating with talking .^^ The answer is 
universally applicable. Both practices loosen 
the tongue. 

But it was not in restaurants of the more 
obvious type that I passed my leisure evening 
hours. Our commissioner had already told us 
that women speak more intelligibly than men. 
If you would talk accurately, he said, seek 
the women and little children. The children 
were seldom unafraid. So I, generally in 
company with Serruys, sought the singing 
girls. 

The Geisha Girl, as she is prettily termed in 
Japan, is a much misunderstood little woman. 

43 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

Her art is solely that of dispensing light 
entertainment. Her soul remains always un- 
touched. It is as if she revolved about her- 
self, permitting the eyes of men only a fleeting 
glance of her clean heart. I have yet to see 
any one except a drunken foreigner insult one 
of these butterflies of the East; and on this 
occasion the little thing turned to him and 
said through her frightened, trembling lips, 
"You must not drink any more, master. You 
are not yourself when you drink." It was a 
subtle compliment to the essential divinity in 
man, and in this case the divine in the man 
responded and, as it were, electrified him into 
sobriety. 

My home was unique, but I was there, and 
it is often most difficult to keep good company 
with ourselves. The singing girls afforded an 
avenue of escape, and I cannot refrain from 
mentioning that we brought much pleasure 
into their lives. Besides, the atmosphere in 
which they lived was thoroughly Oriental. 
As a foreigner I did not have access to the 
homes of the Chinese except in my official 
capacity as a visitor representing the great 
republic. Then, too, the charm of the Orient 
has always been more or less of an under- 
ground affair. Only the color and strangeness 
of it are patent to the view. But the throbbing 

44 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

romance of life is buried away from the prying 
eyes of the casual looker-on. One soon tires 
of sights. It is the human heart that peren- 
nially interests, and underneath a seething 
sea of commonplace actions and faces shimmer 
the subtler issues of life. 

As elsewhere intimated, a certain wise sage 
secretly gave his sanction to love. In all 
respects but this, the Chinese order their days 
with naturalness. Happy that man, runs 
another proverb, who falls in love with his 
wife. And this is the truly unfortunate part 
of it, that a man and a woman may be con- 
demned to everlasting companionship without 
a spark of affection subsisting between them. 
It is no wonder that the Tartar princesses, 
beautiful proud creatures whose blood throbbed 
for their ideal mates, preferred the closing 
rush of cold waters to an existence unutterably 
dull. 

And so there is an undercurrent of romance 
that sweeps one on irresistibly, once one has 
felt its kiss. Husbands seek love without the 
marital bond. And many a little girl whose 
coming into the world was frowned upon has 
lived to shake an emperor's throne because 
she was beautiful and gracious in his sight. 
I have not seen romance on the surface but 
I have seen it and felt it in the world of night, 

45 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

which, in China, is not black with the wicked- 
ness of vice, but colorful and quick with ihe, 
old eternal value of the stars. 

I shall long remember Mignonette who was 
first pointed out to me in the gardens sur- 
rounding the old imperial palace. I had gone 
there from a high sense of duty, for to have 
resided in Moukden and not to have seen the 
ancient home of the Manchu kings was in- 
deed to have fallen into historical decrepitude. 
The palace was only a shade less beautiful 
than the palaces of the Tartars in Peking. 
There were the customary great stone courts, 
flanked with representations of an imaginary 
animal kingdom but with none of the real. 
The expansive yellow roofs swept with low 
wide lines so that I fancied I could touch the 
eaves of them until I got quite near, when 
they curved audaciously upwards, curling just 
out of reach. At the very top, on either end, 
a dragon reared its sinuous head, and eight 
little dogs were pictured as barking farther 
down. From these the evil spirits kept a 
respectful distance. The wooden columns 
supporting the roof were variously painted. 
Each color taken alone seemed too brilliant 
for sight. But together they blended with 
such harmonious confusion that the result was 
a kind of sensual pleasure, so that I lingered 

46 




TEMPLEIJ ROOFS 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

by them, wondering why my soul seemed 
risen to my eyes. 

Inside, the palaces were already musty with 
age. It was an experience of the unique to 
put my hand on the emperor's throne and 
visualize the terrible monarch sitting there. I 
say terrible because it would be his chiefest 
delight to strike terror into the hearts of his 
people. The people were afraid of nothing but 
devils and their emperor. Both of these 
agencies had the power of death in their hands; 
the one slow and uncertain, the other quick 
and sure. Wherefore the emperor was more 
to be feared than the devil. And in this 
thought he received his chiefest compensation 
for the monotonies of the throne. 

But what had Mignonette to do with all 
this? The venerable gatekeeper confided to 
me that she lingered in the gardens habitually, 
and that rumor had it that she was descended 
from a long line of imperial favorites. Some 
one mentioned the fact to her one day, and 
ever since she has looked on the gardens as 
peculiarly her own. She was standing near 
a potted diminutive pine when first I saw her. 
And the truth of the matter is I perceived her 
image in the pool at whose brink she paused 
before I caught a glimpse of her own charm- 
ing self. The diminutive pine was set on the 

47 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

edge of the pool. Just beneath the surface 
gold and silver carp swam lazily to and fro. 
Of course I had seen the back of her when the 
gatekeeper originally told me who she was. 
But at her face I could only guess and my 
guessing fell short of the truth. 

I saw the various colors of her cloak re- 
flected in the nearly opaque water. She was 
costumed in a cherry-blossom pink; the whole 
effect of her dress was to enhance the delicate 
glow on her cheeks, as if her garments were in 
reality white but had caught up their hue 
from her skin, as distant clouds are tinted by 
ones of deeper hue. She must have been 
aware of my presence earlier than I thought, 
for it struck me that she smiled through the 
medium of the water. But when I smiled in 
return, if it were in return, she became in- 
stantly serious, seeming solicitous for the fish 
whom she fed out of a little silk bag dangling 
from her arm. 

I walked quite near her; she drew back 
from the edge of the pool to let me pass. But 
I signified by a sweep of my arm that I had 
no desire to pass. Whereat she smiled prettily, 
made the barest shadow of a curtsy, and went 
on feeding the gold and silver carp. 

I asked her if I too might feed the carp. 
I had to repeat this question before a complete 

48 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

sense of it broke upon her. She had not 
imagined a man being so trivially employed. 
But when I insisted, she held out her arm, 
inviting me by this action to help myself, as 
it were. This was the prelude to a delightful 
acquaintance. Her modesty, for she was 
essentially modest, did not obtrude on me like 
that of the Chinese women I met formally. I 
suppose her vocation as singing girl had given 
her a certain familiarity with men, but it was 
in no wise vulgar. Then, too, it was my 
acquaintance with Mignonette that prepared 
me for an acquaintance with a Tartar princess. 
But I liked Mignonette for her piquant 
Oriental ways. With the waving of a wand 
she might have been a princess. It certainly 
was her nature. 

I doubt if anything could be more romantic 
than to sit, sometimes recline as the old 
Romans did, near a little red lacquer tray 
garnished with every imaginable delicacy, lis- 
tening to this almond-eyed beauty chant the 
folklore of her people. It was like a repetition 
of the Arabian Nights. 

The room where I dined to the music of her 
liquid talk was little and oblong. The floor 
was carpeted with a gray camel's-hair creation 
in the center of which a blue dragon lay like 
one drugged to rest in billowy down. The 

49 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

furniture was of teak, and the little dais, or 
k'ang, which occupied the farther end of the 
room somewhat after the manner of a throne, 
was tastefully decorated with a copper brazier 
burning a most delectable incense, and two 
perfect examples of large cloisonne. On either 
side of the brazier was stretched a finely 
woven straw matting with a cylinder-like 
pillow of red at the top. A low pearl inlaid 
table supported the brazier and it was upon 
a portion of this table that my food invariably 
was set. 

Mignonette arranged herself on the other 
side, and between plying my chopsticks, I 
gazed at her through the blue smoke of the 
incense. I could easily imagine her to be 
some fairy spirit risen out of the brazier. She 
must have perceived my inclination for senti- 
ments of this sort. For she uttered a little 
laugh, crisp and metallic, whenever I got in 
this mood, and always it recalled me to myself 
and her. 

She wore her hair parted cleanly in the 
middle with the long black plaits coiled in 
plaques over her ears. There was not the 
slightest suggestion of ornamentation about 
her, except for a pair of heavy bracelets of 
beaten gold which were fastened about her 
wrists by the softness of the metal. Though 

50 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

I must have dined with Mignonette a dozen, 
perhaps even twenty times, I do not recall 
seeing her twice garmented the same. She 
had an air of infinite variety, and even the 
identical songs seemed different on successive 
evenings. I had favorite ones and we were 
constantly disputing whether she had sung 
the piece requested. And invariably she 
repeated it slowly, like a nun telling her beads. 

At the end she would say, "Now do you 
believe me or not.'^" 

Selecting an especially choice morsel for her 
lips, I would answer, "I believe." 



51 



CHAPTER IV 

Why will people persist in paying tribute 
to names? Do the Chinese go to church on 
Sunday, one asks? I can only answer that in 
China Sunday has no concern with the prac- 
tices of the Christian religion. Li-pai, the 
initial day of the week, signifies to pay a call, 
and on this day those who are so fortunate 
as not to have to toil clothe themselves in their 
most magnificent raiment and repair to the 
houses of their friends. Of course, somebody 
stays at home. But the matter works out 
logically enough, when one considers that the 
lesser always go to the great, — another instance 
of Mahomet seeking the mountain. 

But there are holidays in which everybody 
joins, when even the beggars make a pretense 
of idling, and the very dogs desist from their 
scavengerlike activities. The New Year's fes- 
tival continues for about three weeks, and dur- 
ing this period every community, be it great 
or small, blooms like an American beauty rose. 
Red has always been a violent color and indic- 
ative of life. And so I suppose it is not illogical 

52 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

that the Chinese have chosen it to represent 
an epitome of their feelings. 

The doors are hterally covered with strips of 
scarlet paper on which various homely prov- 
erbs are written. Some of these propitiate the 
devil, or more properly devils, while others 
simply ask that fortune may follow those who 
dwell within. I have never observed people 
reading these sentiments and I imagine this 
is because they are universally known, and 
through constant usage have fallen into a kind 
of moral desuetude. But they do serve one 
purpose, however; and this is to brighten the 
otherwise dull brown and gray of the walls and 
buildings. In China, during New Year's, one 
cannot help seeing red, and occasionally yellow, 
which is the color of the dragon and really 
more pleasing to the eye. 

That first New Year's festival in Moukden 
will always be memorable for me because I 
passed the greater part of it in the open 
country. One of my colleagues, a Japanese 
who had already been in residence a year and 
was pretty much of a pilgrim, suggested that 
we spend two or three days at T'ang Kang 
Tzu, a famous bathing hostelry in southern 
Manchuria. T'ang Kang Tzu is situated in 
the district made famous by a number of skir- 
mishes preliminary to the Battle of Moukden. 

53 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

But even had there been no hastily thrown-up 
trenches and scarred rocks and cannon-ball 
pierced temples, the traveler would still have 
wended his way to the sulphur springs. It was 
a rare sight with the thermometer below zero 
to watch the little boiling lake that surrounded 
the inn with an odoriferous mist, while the 
smell of warm steam formed a sharp contrast 
to the penetrating cold of the winter air. 

We were surprised to learn that the inn was 
in character more Japanese than Chinese, but 
this in no way detracted from our subsequent 
pleasure. No sooner had I been assigned my 
room than I quite naturally conceived the 
idea of taking a sulphur bath. To this end I 
clapped my hands as loudly as I could and 
was almost instantly gratified to see the little 
sliding door move noiselessly back and a 
Japanese girl step out of her clogs and into 
my chamber. She gave me only a fleeting 
inconsequential glance and busied herself with 
the embers of a tiny charcoal brazier, the sole 
source of heat for the entire room. She 
squatted over it, warming her hands, and 
occasionally stirring it up. I watched her 
features intently, wondering whether she had 
come in answer to the clap of my hands or of 
her own accord. Finally she did look up at me, 
and, noticing that I had in no wise altered 

54 




TERRACED HILLS NEAR T AXG KANG TZU 




FARMER WITH ODD PLOW-MATES 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

since her entry into the chamber, she suggested, 
with rather a compHcated motion of her hands, 
that I make ready for the bath. 

I was so pleased we had at last come to an 
understanding of some sort that I jauntily 
removed my coat. My shoes were in the 
corridor so I could not commence with them. 
My coat I rustled as loudly as I could, but the 
maiden gave it not the slightest heed. Then 
I removed my waistcoat and collar and tie, 
but similarly to no avail. Still she squatted 
before the charcoal brazier. Perhaps she is 
waiting until the fire gets thoroughly going, I 
thought. I will wait a moment. She may be 
lost in meditation. But the only effect of my 
arrested movements was to cause her to rustle 
her hand in one of the flowing sleeves of her 
kimono and bring forth a kind of calico robe 
which she placed on the straw matting about 
midway between us. Noticing that I made no 
move to take it up, she looked at me quickly 
and seemed surprised to learn that I still was 
conventionally attired. But she passed no 
remark, at least no intelligible one, and rec- 
ommenced warming her chubby hands. 

Good heavens, I thought, has the girl no 
modesty? One of my colleagues went clacking 
by my door and hallooed me to hurry along, as 
there was to be a sachimi feast directly after 

55 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

the bathing. He had never been in a sulphur 
bath before and was eager to join the others. 
I hkewise was eager, but there were certain 
impediments to my haste. I could not help 
wondering if my colleagues had suffered like 
obstacles. Perhaps theirs were uglier than 
mine and older too. But this, this mere slip 
of a girl, certainly did not know what she was 
about. I looked her squarely in the eyes. No, 
she was mentally alert. There was about her 
nothing pertaining to the idiot. She seemed 
possessed of all her faculties. In this respect 
she was to be entitled to far more consideration 
than I. For I doubt if I were possessed of a 
half of them. 

The end of it was that I discreetly slipped 
into my calico robe. Whereat she rose to her 
feet, slid back the little paper door, and bade 
me follow her. There had not been a sugges- 
tion of indecency about the matter. And why, 
I have often since asked myself, should there 
have been.f^ She had come to conduct me to 
my bath, and instead of waiting in the cold 
corridor she had squatted beside my fire. I 
would have been a wretch to turn her out and 
she would not have understood such a sum- 
mary action. 

What an admirable race these Japanese are! 
Only a little way back they were savages. 

56 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

To-day they are civilized. And the jBne part 
of it is that they have retained the best 
quahties of the savage. Nothing physical 
startles them. They are the only race making 
a pretense to civilization who has not mixed 
its drinks. This is one of the sources of their 
strength. Poor, nearly effete, supercivilized 
China has wandered away from nature, and 
nature has exacted a heavy penalty from her 
But this little girl was as natural as a flower, 
and not, therefore, less charming. 

The bath was a large Roman affair with a 
series of steps leading down to the water, and 
a number of stone pedestals with straw cush- 
ions on the tops of them served as depositories 
for our robes. My companions were already as 
red as salmon. For the sulphur water is 
merely piped from the lake into the bath and 
it usually takes the novice, depending on 
whether he slips or not, from twenty minutes 
to an hour to become fully immersed. One 
end of the bath was reserved for women and 
children. But, as fate ran, we had it all to 
ourselves, though, on the succeeding days, 
when Japanese patrons and their families be- 
gan to arrive from the south, we were a motley 
crowd, but none the less a decorous one. 

That evening, still garbed in our kimonos, 
and with a variety of pretty serving maids 

57 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

hovering like so many butterflies over our 
reclining forms, we ate our sachimi. The word 
in itself means a variety of things to eat. 
The particular pleasure in eating sachimi is 
derived from the fact of cooking the food for 
oneself. A little lacquer table, with a small 
copper stove set in the middle of it, was 
deposited before each one of us. And then 
the serving maids brought in a multitude of 
tiny plates containing all sorts of viands and 
herbs from thin juicy portions of red beef and 
carved chicken to the succulent bamboo and 
tasty eggplant. A bowl with beaten eggs and 
a frying pan completed the equipment. 

The method of cooking was to place the 
diminutive spider over the equally diminutive 
stove, introduce some fatty substance to form 
a grease, and then put in the beef and chicken 
and bamboo sprouts and everything else in 
heterogeneous confusion. The result was a 
highly delectable dish that afforded some 
three mouthfuls of the backwoods variety. 
The bowl of beaten raw eggs was used as a 
kind of sauce into which the morsels were 
dipped and cooled before committing them to 
their final oblivion. Once the frying pan was 
emptied, there was nothing to do but com- 
mence all over again, which we did some ten 
or twelve times, when bowls of rice were 

58 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

brought in and we took ceremonial leave of 
our repast. 

All this while two children, who gave the 
appearance of being animated dolls, so highly 
were they colored and so fantastically dressed, 
entertained us variously. First they played on 
a sort of zither and sang, too, with little 
melodious voices, clear and passionless. After- 
wards they went through a kind of panto- 
mimic show which exactly fitted their natures 
and their costumes. There was something 
excessively incongruous about the whole affair. 
I could not help feeling that they might much 
better have been at home with their mothers 
or else in school, instead of treading so young 
the primrose path of glory. But the little 
women were quite unmindful of their tender 
years. A sober responsibility shone about 
their painted features, and when I smiled at 
them they did not giggle foolishly in return, 
but simply bowed their heads as artists will 
who acknowledge merited applause. 

T'ang Kang Tzu is some hundred miles to 
the south of Moukden and I did not realize 
the differences in temperature until I returned. 
This winter of the snowless variety has a 
certain deliberate iciness to it which chills one 
to the marrow. The brilliancy of the sun is 
altogether deluding. One fancies one can go 

59 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

about with impunity, and so one can, if one 
will. But nature ever exacts her requital, and 
stinging cheeks and numb ears await him who 
puts much faith in appearances. 

I shall never forget the day of my first 
appointment with my Japanese dentist. It 
was eight o'clock of a cold winter's morning 
that I strode briskly around the city walls. 
Contrary to custom, there was a light blanket 
of snow on the ground. Numberless warm 
winds had swept up from the sea to be met by 
equally cold ones from Siberia. The result was 
a light fall of snow, and the city became 
strangely clean, as if by magic. 

Just near the police headquarters, as I was 
striding by, my attention was claimed by the 
prostrate figure of a man who lay a little to 
one side on the farther bank of a ditch. I 
went near out of a natural curiosity and found 
that he was alive, though slowly freezing. Of 
course he was a cKiung jen, a poor man, in 
reality a beggar in the clutches of a most 
noxious habit. I called the attention of some 
soldiers to him. They only laughed and made 
a motion with their hands as if they were 
about to inject morphine into the fleshy parts 
of their arms. "Ma-fei," they said. "He 
eats morphine." But even so, I countered, 
you can't let the man lie there and freeze to 

60 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

death. But the soldiers only laughed derisively. 
Perhaps it was only surprise that I, a foreigner, 
should have taken an interest, quite unaccount- 
able in their eyes, in such a low being as a 
beggar. Finally I asked them what would be 
done with him. One of the soldiers, an officer, 
replied, "When he is dead the city will bury 
him." Realizing how powerless I was to effect 
anything against the traditions of this people, I 
went my way, though my heart beat high with 
a not unrighteous indignation. 

When a few hours later I returned, the 
beggar was lying a little farther up, as if he 
were seeking the shelter of the city walls. 
But even these had been denied him, for the 
cold had chilled his heart, and now he lay 
there, his naked limbs drawn into his hollow 
chest, waiting for the only service his city ever 
would do him. An old official told me that a 
thousand beggars froze in the streets of 
Moukden during a particularly severe winter. 
On hearing this I was tempted to hate them 
all, but on further reflection I could only come 
to the point at which most of the older foreign 
residents long since had arrived: namely, that 
such is life in China, and that to alter it you 
first must change the course of ancient history. 

But if the fate of the beggar was a distaste- 
ful affair, that of my cook was eminently 

61 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

more pleasing. I came home one day to find 
a substitute in the kitchen. Now in a land 
where service is cheaper than silver one soon 
gets accustomed to having things done in a 
certain manner, the meat at one's table not 
excepted. So when I noticed that the food 
was not as it used to be, I demanded an 
explanation from the chief servant, or boy, as 
he is more familiarly termed. This particular 
kuan-shih-ti, or housekeeper, spoke very broken 
English, but he was understandable, so I 
always conversed with him in my vernacular. 

"What this mean.^" I asked. "Number one 
cook go away. Kitchen now belong very 
much number two. I no savvy this food." 

"Cook wife make him present number one 
girl," my boy replied. "Cook all time say 
wife no belong home. All time go foreign 
mistress, sew, clean house, wash babies. Cook 
wife say must go, plenty money belong foreign 
mistress side. Cook say wife belong home side. 
Wife no wanchee stay home side. Cook get 
angry beat wife. So wife say allight, you 
wanchee wife, I pay you girl. So wife pay 
cook number one girl. Cook stay home one 
two day see girl belong fit, no belong fit." 

"You mean to tell me, kuan-shih-ti, that 
my cook's wife bought him a girl.^^" 

"Yes, he wife buy him girl." 
62 




BRONZE IN'CEXSK BLRNER AT LAMA TEMPLE 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

"And how much did she pay?" 

"Cook no speak price fashion. Number one 
girl belong twelve fifteen dollars." 

"But I should think the cook's wife would 
belong jealous." 

"No belong jealous. Wife he go foreign 
mistress side, make plenty money. Cook he 
say wife belong home side. Cook wife no 
belong fit. What can do? Cook wanchee 
wife, so wife pay him number one girl. Now 
all belong fit. Allight." 

As my kuan-shih-ti persisted in this version 
of affairs, and as my food persisted in being 
very much number two, I decided to take 
matters by the horns the very next day. So in 
the morning I sought my cook. He lived 
in a fairly respectable part of the city. His 
house contained three or four rooms, so I 
could easily understand why he should insist 
on having some one to keep them tidy for him. 

Let it be understood that to cook for a 
foreigner is a very great opportunity indeed. 
"Squeeze," that Chinese custom immemorially 
old, is practiced with rare diligence by cooks. 
It is a custom to which every foreign mistress 
must sooner or later submit. For although 
she may take her basket on her arm and go 
forth into the smelly places of the city, she 
will find, much to her chagrin, that the butcher 

63 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

has "squeezed" her. Even though the price 
seems ridiculously low to her foreign way of 
thinking, she is bound to realize that to the 
native it is a number of coppers lower. When 
she returns her cook will ask her, "How much 
Missy pay this piece .^" And then the old 
cook will smile and say, "Oh, too much, too 
much." So the Missy finally gives in and the 
cook pockets a half of the difference. 

For this reason my cook lived in style and 
thought he could afford to inflict on me a 
substitute. I found him smoking a long pipe 
just inside the devil screen. The devil screen 
is a detached piece of masonry, like a wall, 
in front of the door. Any stray devil will thus 
be deflected from entering the house, for it is a 
fact well known to anthropomorphical science 
that devils always travel in straight lines and 
parallel to the earth. My cook was sitting on 
the lea side of the devil screen, — which is 
quite necessary with a number one girl in the 
offing. 

He must have been disagreeably perturbed 
to see me, but with true Chinese simplicity he 
did not manifest the same. He slowly knocked 
the ash from his pipe, giving at the same time 
a little guttural cry as if he were clearing 
his throat. It was what native mothers said 
to their children when foreigners came by. 

64 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

Freely translated that cry said, "Make your- 
self scarce." 

"Aren't you well, cook?" I asked. 

Perhaps he had not been thinking of feign- 
ing until I gave him this lead. If so, I must 
apologize for doing him a wrong. If I sug- 
gested to him that he be false I am heartily 
sorry for it. He had already risen halfway from 
his seat with alacrity. I took special note of 
this, for having eleven servants had made me 
unduly perspicacious. But the other half of 
the distance from a sort of incipient recum- 
bency to erectness was covered slowly, and 
with a suggestion of distress quite overpower- 
ing. 

"Belong stiff, very stiff," the cook said 
finally. 

"That's too bad, cook," I answered, "for 
I've come to tell you this number two business 
is no good. I must let your substitute go. 
Will you recommend a cook in your place?" 

"No belong that fashion quick, master. 
Leg he soon belong more better. Maybe 
to morrow I come back." 

"No, cook, to-morrow is too far away. How 
much do I owe you?" 

"Allight. Must cook, must cook. Wife he 
all time go foreign side. Dirt everywhere. 
What can do?" 

65 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

"Why don't you hire a girl, cook, to keep 
your house tidy while your wife's away?" 

" Kuan-shih-ti talk too much. You know? 
Allight. Belong Chinese fashion pay girl, 
suppose wife no stay home. I come now." 

Whereat the cook, not one whit chagrined at 
having made a partial fool of himself, called 
out for some one to bring him his hat. In 
another instant a rosy-cheeked Chinese girl, 
gayly attired, appeared in the doorway. She 
could not have been above sixteen years of age, 
though she was quite womanly withal. Had 
she been married, her hair would have been 
built up in the customary manner. But as 
she was still a virgin, she wore it in one thick 
shiny braid down her back. A little piece of 
red string had been plaited into the end of the 
braid, so there could be no doubt of her status, 
for a piece of red string at the end of a braid 
denotes the maiden. 

At sight of me she paused, for she was as yet 
unaccustomed to her master, not to mention a 
foreign stranger, who in the vernacular was 
racily termed a devil. But the cook did not 
tolerate maidenly modesty. Perhaps in his 
eyes it was not among the original virtues. So 
he cried out the single word, *' Lai-come," and 
she came toward us, tripping lightly along 
with the cook's foolish hat, an old soft one of 

66 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

mine, in her hand. In another instant we had 
passed to the street side of the devil screen and 
left the young lady wonderingly alone. 

Perhaps she thought her master wanted to 
be rid of her, and that I was a prospective 
customer. I never saw her again, though 
invariably, whenever I met the cook out of the 
kitchen, I inquired for his number one girl. 

"Still belong m?'' I would ask. 

"Hsing-ah — can do," he flippantly would 
reply. 



67 



CHAPTER V 

The fourth of July broke on me quite un- 
expectedly one morning. It is strange that 
I should not have been looking forward to 
it; strange when one considers that the bulk 
of the paraphernalia of the noisiest days of 
our youth came from this fairyland over the 
sea. But the best firecrackers have always 
remained in China. Never have I heard such 
terrific explosions as these veritable small can- 
non made. Of course the Chinese do not 
celebrate the glorious fourth. But then the 
natives are always celebrating. In this in- 
stance, however, it was an American col- 
league who started the affair. And the rest 
of the Europeans almost immediately joined 
in, quite to the delight of the venders of small 
explosives, for we were extremely prodigal 
of noise. 

The best of the lot was a cracker which 
went off twice, and the beautiful feature of 
the thing was that you never knew where 
it would be when it exploded the second time. 
Throw it where you would, it would jump, 

68 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

sometimes fifty feet, to the most unlikely 
places, straight into the air, off to one side, 
or occasionally bury its nose in the earth. 

Our commissioner was a sedate English- 
man of scholarly disposition. That after- 
noon, while he was sitting with perfect aplomb 
on the veranda of the International Club, 
conversing with various consuls' wives, Ever- 
hart, an American colleague, playfully and 
for the special delectation of the ladies, threw 
a double cannon far out, as he thought, on 
the tennis courts. As it landed it went off 
with magnificent volume. Then it hesitated, 
wriggled like a worm that has been stepped 
on, and shot with remarkable precision straight 
for the commissioner's chair. It fell at his 
feet and there it exploded with every ounce 
of its pent-up fury. 

The commissioner, who wore a walrus mus- 
tache and looked inordinately like Rudyard 
Kipling, tipped inelegantly backwards. This 
also to the delectation of the ladies. And then 
he rose to his feet, righted the chair with a 
little venom, I thought, and said to my col- 
league, who was on the point of laughing but 
didn't quite know if it would be in order, 
"Everhart, you're an ass." 

Everybody heard it and the bulk of us con- 
curred. 

69 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

But in a way I was secretly glad. For when 
Everhart first came to Moukden and was 
paying the commissioner an initial call, the 
latter, in discussing the study of the language, 
said, *'You may find some difficulty in under- 
standing the text at first. You know it's 
written in English." 

That night within the precincts of the old 
palace we let forth a bedlam of noise. When 
the cannon crackers gave out we resorted 
to shotguns and small arms. Every win- 
dow — they were mostly paper ones — was shat- 
tered by the concussion. When the affair 
was at its zenith I heard a tumultuous knock- 
ing at the gate. Opening it, I found a regi- 
ment of soldiery crowding through the nar- 
row street. Heavy is the head that wears 
a crown! Poor little Chang Tso-lin thought 
the city was being attacked, so with true Na- 
poleonic strategy he had become the aggres- 
sor. I explained what the noise signified, 
and the officer was gracefully making me 
a bow when a double cannon exploded over 
our heads and hurtled into the mass of soldiers 
to tell its second story. In the confusion that 
followed I shut and doublebarred the gate. 
How we regretted firing all our double can- 
non so early in the evening! 

The bulk of my holidays were spent at 
70 




EMPERORS TOMBS, MOUKDEN 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

the Manchu tombs. I rode thither on one 
or another of my ponies, my servant follow- 
ing with guns and wines and various edibles. 
To reach the little north gate I had to cross 
the city, and this was ever a matter of con- 
cern, for my pony had a most objectionable 
habit of tossing his head, and frequently he 
knocked down a man. Once down, the man 
would remain excessively inanimate, with one 
eye squinting, however, until I produced the 
necessary silver. All humans like to be bene- 
factors. And whenever I went to the Manchu 
tombs I invariably raised a dozen people from 
the dead. But it became so costly that I 
had to discontinue crossing the city while 
astride. I have often wondered if my Chinese 
pony was in conspiracy with his own people 
against me. 

Before reaching the emperors' tombs I was 
frequently reminded of my destination by 
the sight of numerous mounded graves. There 
are graves everywhere in China. One au- 
thority with a genius for figures calculated 
that a twelfth of the arable soil is given over 
to the repose of the dead. Sufiice it to re- 
mark in passing that one of the chief obsta- 
cles to railway enterprise in the Middle King- 
dom is dead men's bones. Point your finger 
where it listeth and it must designate a grave; 

71 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

and graves are sacred, for the dead are more 
knowing, because closer to devils, than the 
living. They must be propitiated. Long live 
the dead! 

Before I came to the Manchu tombs I passed 
our little golf course, which is an affair of nine 
holes. One of these holes is known as the 
"grave," and another as the "skeleton." The 
grave hole is just that; an open grave with 
the oblong box very much in evidence. The 
skeleton hole is just that also. Many times 
I have deftly recovered a 31 Dunlop ball which 
lay where once had pulsed a human heart. 
Irreverent, you suggest. No, gentle reader, 
I was never that. I always made a point of 
putting the ribs back exactly where I found 
them. 

The approach to the Manchu tombs is one 
of the never-fading beauties of northern China. 
Imagine a desolate country, — the bare brown 
soil stretching as far as the eye can reach. 
A thousand years has it been denuded, for 
the need of humans for warmth is more im- 
perative than the desire of the eye for a pleas- 
ing landscape. But here the trees are not 
cut down. It is as if the people intuitively 
knew that the souls of the dead were fragile 
dijSident things that wanted shelter from the 
gaze of a toil-worn world. The tombs of China 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

are its most magnificent parks, its museums, 
its architectural relics. 

First came smooth slopes that from a dis- 
tance looked like closely shaven lawns. There 
was a little one-arch bridge over a stream 
fed by a tiny lake that ranged along one side 
of the road leading to the tombs. The road 
was flanked with Chinese pines, their twisted 
branches like writhing arms supplicating 
heaven. At equal distances strange stone 
creatures reared themselves out of the long 
grass, and I was not content till I rode out 
one evening by moonlight when I could im- 
agine them animate, and very terrible they 
seemed. 

A quarter of a mile away, glittering just 
over the tree tops, I discerned the roofs of 
the tombs, but it was not until I got near 
them that they broke on me with all the riot- 
ousness of their Oriental splendor. Upon the 
roofs of temples and tombs and palaces the 
Chinese have lavished the entire wealth of 
their creative imaginations. The roofs of Pei- 
ling, the north tombs, are mostly of yellow 
tile, and it is diflScult to appreciate the rich 
beauty of them rising over the tops of the 
pines. The buildings comprising the tombs 
are surrounded by a red-washed wall that 
dips into little ravines and surmounts tiny 

73 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

hills, seeming always to flow like a river of 
sheer color. 

The resting place of the Manchu king is 
beneath a huge mound of earth faced with 
mortar. It must have taken innumerable 
hands to raise this mound alone. The old 
gatekeeper led me to the iron doors of the 
tomb and asked if he should recount the tale 
of the royal interment. I put a silver half 
dollar in the palm of his outstretched hand 
and told him to go ahead. Whereat he re- 
counted a truly marvelous tale of the Orient 
of old. 

The king had been buried in great state. 
His wife and numerous concubines had wept 
so copiously that their tears ran into the secret 
places of the earth, finally to bubble up an^ 
hundred years later in the form of the little 
lake outside the tomb. Jewels of immense 
value were sent by God's representative on 
earth, the great Dalai Lama himself, and 
these were buried with the emperor. All his 
gold and silver plate was interred with un- 
precedented pomp and pageantry. And finally 
the great teak coffin itself, with the mortal 
remains of the king, was borne through the 
courtyard and into the presence of the royal 
family who with one accord did their lord a 
final obeisance. 

74 




COFFIN BOKXE THROUGH STREET 




BUDDHIST PRIESTS INT0NINC4 FOR THE DEAD 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

The coffin was borne by eighty men who 
walked with it into the very bowels of the 
earth. Hardly had the cover of the sarcoph- 
agus been set in place before the iron doors 
closed forever and eighty poor humans who 
had never done anyone harm were entombed 
with their king. It was the old story of "dead 
men tell no tales." The royal family were 
unwilling to trust the knowledge of the jewels 
to anyone outside their circle. So they had 
given the order that the coffin bearers be en- 
tombed alive. 

I could not help but look on this monu- 
mental grave with a shudder to think of the 
awful struggle that had taken place within. I 
could picture the unfortunate wretches beat- 
ing in vain against the unyielding panels of 
the door. There must have gone up a sor- 
rowful shriek to heaven. And I could imagine 
the royal family, the almond-eyed princesses 
no doubt turning tearfully away, pausing to 
listen to the abating tumult. For eighty 
men are a great number in a little place. The 
hole of Calcutta was nothing when compared 
to this, and yet this was nothing when com- 
pared to the Mongol prisons. 

I have looked with mist-covered eyes into 
the face of what once had been a man. Poor 
fellow, he had committed a petty thievery, 

75 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

for which he was sentenced to prison for the 
space of fifteen years. Had it been an ordi- 
nary prison he might have come out a man, 
but in this instance it were better had the 
punishment been capital. He was shut into a 
box too short to permit his lying extended and 
too low for him even to sit erect. A diamond- 
shaped hole was cut in the side of the box 
and this was all the means of ventilation and 
light he had. When I peered into his flash- 
ing eyes, for all his energy was gathered in 
his eyes, he had been imprisoned only seven 
years. His limbs were atrophied. He had 
become a mere automaton, a mockery of na- 
ture. I wanted to speak with him but I did 
not know his tongue, so I merely smiled, for 
I thought he would rather that I smile than 
do anything else. And I shall always remem- 
ber how his eyes seemed to soften, as if he 
had not misinterpreted my meaning. There 
was a pitiful whining noise and I turned 
away. 

For a thousand years the burial place of 
the Mongol kings was unknown. And it was 
only accidentally discovered. With the dis- 
covery of the underground tombs, documents 
were also uncovered pertaining to the man- 
ner of secreting the dead. The Mongols were 
high-spirited folk who paused at nothing. When 

76 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

a king died, ten thousand soldiers were se- 
lected to flank the funeral cortege on either 
side to the distance of three miles. Every 
human being, man, woman, and child, was 
shot down until the final resting place was 
reached. Here the king was entombed and 
a thousand wild horses let loose over the ground 
to obliterate all trace of the interment. In 
this manner were the burying grounds of 
the Kings kept secret. 

It was one of these kings or khans who in 
the thirteenth century conceived the idea of 
crossing the Ural Mountains, subduing Russia, 
and thence proceeding to Europe for pur- 
poses of conquest and annexation. Had not 
fate intervened I have little doubt that the 
yellow race would to-day be the rulers of the 
earth. But fate did intervene and supersti- 
tion was his handmaiden. A prince of the 
royal blood died, and, according to Mongol 
custom, the court went into mourning for 
three years. Whereat the expedition to Europe 
was delayed and eventually abandoned. For 
the king was grieved at the death of his son 
and soon died, to be succeeded by one less 
ambitious and virile than he. 

On those Sunday afternoons at the tombs 
I gave up most of my time to shooting. Often 
the party formed rather a considerable crowd, 

77 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

so we would have a competition to see who 
could break the greatest number of bottles. 
The bottles, supposed to be pigeons, were 
thrown into the air by our servants, but by- 
far the majority of them dashed themselves 
into fragments on the ground. 

It was at one of these parties that a visit- 
ing commissioner, an Irishman from Dublin, 
recounted two singularly pleasing tales. They 
might be more fitly termed after-dinner stories. 
Fancy us seated under the open sky within 
the shadow of the Manchu tombs, great hawks 
circling over us and occasionally swooping 
down to a distance fifty feet above our heads. 
The Irish commissioner sat a little apart from 
the others and punctuated his narrative with 
frequent sips of wine. 

"You might care to know an incident with 
regard to this vale of tears," he said, indicat- 
ing the little lake with a movement of his 
hand. 

"It was seven years ago that I was out 
here looking for duck with my servant. We 
were almost despairing of sighting any when 
I caught a glimpse of three riding the surface 
some hundred feet from the shore. Our shot 
were number eight, so we could not risk a 
try at so great a distance. Finally I told George, 
my native servant named for the King, God 

78 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

bless him, to wade into the water a little way 
and see if he couldn't get near enough to risk 
a shot. 

"So George waded in up to a depth com- 
mensurate with the calves of his legs. 

'"Go in a little farther, George,' I admon- 
ished him. 

"And George went in to a depth commen- 
surate with the middle of his thighs. Still 
I would not let him risk a shot. The duck 
were restless and I did not want to return 
empty-handed. 

"'A little farther, George,' I said. 

"And George went in up to his middle. 
By this time the duck were making concen- 
tric circles around themselves. It would have 
been folly to shoot. So I told George to edge 
a little closer. The water was shallow, so 
he was quite a distance from the shore. With 
this last exhortation he went in to his arm- 
pits, his gun held over his head. The duck 
were quite visibly perturbed by now, so I 
implored George to take another step or two. 
He was by this time up to his neck in water. 
When suddenly the duck raised themselves 
as if to take wing and I cried out, 'Lie down, 
George, lie down, or they'll see you.' 

"And would you believe it," the Irish com- 
missioner finished, "George lay down." 

79 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

This story led to another not so flagrantly 
humorous. 

"Sir Wilkie Wilkinson," said the commis- 
sioner, "was publicly known to be excessively 
fond of his wife. He had not married until 
late in life and he seemed to appreciate this 
new-found attachment which was so unlike 
those he had previously known for his dogs 
and ponies. One day his wife died and the 
grief of Sir Wilkie was so great that he would 
have climbed into the grave and been buried 
with her, had not his friends prevented him. 

"In time, however, his grief subsided, and 
to the astonishment of every one he took 
another wife. Everybody conceded this to be 
an even more satisfactory match than the 
preceding one. But like all delectable things 
it was of short duration. The second Lady 
Wilkinson took sick and died. And, remark- 
able to relate. Sir Wilkie would have climbed 
into the grave a second time had not his friends 
interfered. 

"For a while Sir W^ilkie was quite inconsol- 
able. But in the end he resumed his interest 
in things mundane, which was quite as it 
should have been. However, his friends were 
not a little shocked when they discovered 
that he had made a passing English tourist 
the third Lady Wilkinson. Now I know I 

80 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

am straining your credulity to the breaking 
point, but, would you believe it, poor Sir Wilkie 
had only been married to her six months when 
she passed over in a fit of apoplexy. 

"At the grave his friends rather expected 
Sir Wilkie to exhibit violent emotion, but 
they did not think he would want to climb 
in again. But he did. And then one of his 
oldest acquaintances suggested that as poor 
Sir Wilkie would likely not survive this third 
and greatest sorrow, they might as well let 
him have his way. Though there was a diverg- 
ence of opinion and no little reluctance among 
his friends, a majority of them finally agreed 
to allow Sir Wilkie to be interred with Lady 
Wilkinson. 

"So poor broken-hearted Sir Wilkie Wilkin- 
son climbed into the grave to be buried with 
his beloved. And do you know," said the 
commissioner, in finishing the tale, "they would 
have bm-ied him, if he hadn't cUmbed out 
again." 



81 



CHAPTER VI 

When one morning a captain attended by 
four soldiers presented me with a huge red 
envelope I could think of nothing but that 
the little governor had invited me to become 
his son-in-law. I involuntarily shuddered as 
I broke the yellow seal with the three charac- 
ters signifying Chang Tso-lin grouped prettily 
in the center. I knew he had discovered me 
conversing with Li-ssu, but Li-ssu was only a 
child of some sixteen or eighteen years. To be 
sure, we had taken a fancy to each other. I 
taught her odds and ends of English nursery 
rhymes and she taught me Chinese funny 
stories. One day I discovered her telling me 
Jack and the Beanstalk and when I asked her 
how she happened to know it, she replied that 
one of the Tartar princesses had recounted 
it for her during a sojourn in Peking. Had I 
been a Chinese I should have liked to marry 
Li-ssu. She was beautiful; she was demure; she 
was intelligent. And I must own, too, that 
there were times when I even went so far in 
my dreams as to wish I were a native prince 

82 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

or brigand or just plain cavalier, for there were 
fairy queens a-plenty. 

But the huge red envelope did not pertain 
to little Li-ssu. It was simply an invitation 
from her father to attend the annual ceremo- 
nial worship of the Lamas of Lhassa. There 
are only two Lama temples in the Middle 
Kingdom; one is at Moukden, the other out- 
side Peking. Each year the priests journey 
down from Tibet, skirting the Gobi desert on 
camels, and incurring every conceivable danger, 
for the paraphernalia of their rite is of enor- 
mous value. They bring with them beautiful 
jewels and the most costly robes and an almost 
infinite amount of gold and silver coins. A 
foreigner cannot penetrate the holy of holies 
unless he be invited by high authority. So I 
w^as not unconscious of the honor done me by 
Chang Tso-lin. 

By ten o'clock of the following morning I 
was crossing the city, borne almost impercepti- 
bly along by the immense crowd of natives 
who, unlike me, were bent on satiating their 
consciences as well as their curiosities. It 
was a gala morning and reminded me most 
nearly of the day when the circus came to 
town and everyone as a matter of custom 
repaired to the big white tent. The Chinese 
themselves were not dressed with any particu- 

83 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

lar degree of brilliancy. The Manchu women 
are more somber in their dress than the south- 
ern or Tartar women. Elsewhere the women 
lavish attention on the color of their clothes. 
The Manchu dresses customarily in blue or 
black. And where the southern woman does 
her hair tightly about her head, with perhaps 
two saucer-like plaits covering her ears, the 
Manchu matron gets hers done up after the 
manner of a diminutive Eiffel Tower. Either 
they sleep sitting or they don't sleep at all, for 
surely a day were not sufficient to erect this 
variety of peaks and cascades and gables. 
Then, too, the Manchu women have really 
lovely complexions of the glowing peach va- 
riety. I could never conceive of men being 
cannibals until I went to Moukden. I have 
often been tempted to bite the cheek of a 
Manchu woman to see if it were really flesh 
and blood. 

When I arrived at the gate of the temple I 
found the British consul, together with his 
wife and his daughter, already there. We 
waited until we were joined by the Danish 
postal commissioner, the French and Russian 
and American consuls, and other dignitaries 
of the port, and then proceeded into the 
courtyard, where we were met by the high 
priest himself. He came smilingly to meet us, 

84 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

holding up the hem of his satin robe with one 
hand while he dangled a gorgeous peacock fan 
with the other. His head was shaven and he 
was fat and of a rosy countenance. His robe 
was for the most part yellow, but not brightly 
so. Rather was the color rich and deep, so 
that I fancied I could have buried my fingers 
in the smoothest part of the garment. His 
shoes were of yellow satin also, and there 
were heavy gold rings on his fingers and an 
amber necklace around his neck, the necklace 
terminating in a large amulet of purest jade. 
He wore a beaten silver belt around his waist, 
and from this a string of polished beads 
depended to within an inch of the ground. 

The priest signified that we should follow 
him into the temple. So we passed into 
another courtyard crowded with people, among 
them being a fair sprinkling of priests whose 
gorgeous robes afforded a striking contrast to 
the blues and blacks of the commoners. A 
number of chairs had been placed at the left 
of the altar and thither we were led by our 
priest. He left us with another smiling bow 
and took up his place in front of the biggest 
and most demoniacal-looking god, which latter 
was flanked by two lesser images only a shade 
less terrible in countenance. 

At first the priest seemed to be telling his 
85 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

beads, but in the end he Hfted his head and let 
out a sort of war whoop which was the signal 
for six others, a little farther back, to com- 
mence beating their kettledrums. At this junc- 
ture twelve little boys came out of the obscurity 
of the walls twirling brass prayer wheels, con- 
trivances with inter-revolving cylinders capable 
of saying ten thousand prayers with a single 
twist of the thumb. 

I was totally unprepared for what happened 
next, for I fancied from the din in my ears 
that the climax of the ceremony had been 
reached. But although the remainder of the 
rite was less noisy than the beginning it was 
far more colorful and as truly Oriental as 
anything I have seen. Two devils (I will not 
call them men) danced out of opposite ends of 
the altar and with a skipping step, singularly 
childlike, proceeded towards the center of the 
court. Each of them carried a baton to mark 
the rhythm of the dance. When they reached 
the center of the court they stopped their 
motion, laid their batons over their hearts, 
bowed to the encircling sea of faces, then 
sprang with surprising agility into the air. 
When they landed on their feet again a con- 
cealed orchestra had begun to play and the 
devils took up their dance. 

The first pair of devils represented huge 
86 




AN ABANDONED TEMPLE AT MOUKDEN 




WHIRLING DEVILS 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

frogs. That is, they wore huge masks re- 
sembHng frogs' heads, though the rest of them 
were satin robes of an exquisite purple. After 
a httle I discovered that the devils looked 
through their mouths, which were open and 
about on a level with the eyes of the men 
within. Considering that neither devil paid 
the slightest heed to what the other was 
doing, it was indeed remarkable that they 
danced in such perfect accord. 

They danced and they whirled and they 
danced, their batons all the time spinning 
gracefully in their fingers, one hand now on 
their hips and now extended straight into 
the air. The heat was frightful and I ex- 
pected to see them collapse much sooner than 
they did. It was like a Spanish bullfight. 
No sooner did these frog devils fall exhausted 
to the ground than they were carried off to 
make room for two tiger devils, who did a 
different dance and whose robes were quite 
appropriately of orange and black with tails 
to complete the illusion. 

Every now and again the tiger devils 
emitted a growl in unison, but I could not 
help remarking that each time it became 
fainted and fainter, until finally the tiger 
devils tumbled in black and orange heaps to 
be borne away and replaced by deer devils 

87 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

with magnificent branching antlers. The deer 
devils were more playful than their colleagues 
had been. Their dance was of a distinctly 
lighter nature, or so it seemed to an onlooker 
who was not in the glare of the sun. 

But eventually the deer devils succumbed to 
be replaced by elephant devils who, according 
to my watch, danced exactly three minutes 
and twenty-nine seconds before their mighty 
heads began to sag. In another instant they 
looked as if they had been shot. A priest at 
my elbow ventured the information that 
occasionally a devil died and that it was a 
devil's greatest aspiration to die in a dance, 
for in this way were they deified. I suggested 
that perhaps it would be more satisfactory, at 
least from the devils' point of view, to deify 
them if they survived. But the priest simply 
folded his hands and said, " Bu hsing — that 
would never do." And I suppose he was 
right. If you made deification too easy there 
would be little use in becoming a god. Who 
among us Westerners, I wonder, would vol- 
untarily die to achieve the godhead .^^ 

I was especially interested in noting what 
effect these ceremonies had on the populace. 
But outside of the bulging eyes of numerous 
children I could not discover that they had 
any effect at all. There was a good deal of 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

laughing and talking going on throughout the 
dances, and I imagine the Chinese thought 
that the rites atoned for their sins. Of course, 
the natives are not concerned with this matter 
of sin. Their civilization is nearer that of the 
Garden of Eden before the Fall than any I 
have yet encountered. On the other hand I 
could not help expecting them to be a little 
more reverential and, say, less curious. I did 
not expect them to be so utterly pagan about 
it as I was. But even so, the chief priest 
connived with me in my scheme. 

I had taken along my camera in the hopes 
of getting some interesting, if not altogether 
rare snapshots. But I hadn't the heart to 
desecrate the ceremony by standing out from 
the others. By good chance, however, the 
priest noticed my camera, and pointing to the 
devils, he signified in sign language that I 
should go ahead. So I slunk along the wall 
until I reached a point opposite the devils. I 
took a variety of pictiu-es. I got the devils in 
all conceivable postures. Also I photographed 
one or two priests in gorgeous saffron robes. 
By some rare intuitive forethought I reserved 
one exposure for anything else I might happen 
upon in my rambles around the temple. 
Whether or not I did wisely I must leave to 
the judgment of the reader. 

89 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

After the dance of the devils, the priests 
went back to their mummery and the crowd, 
not anticipating any new spectacular event, 
gradually dispersed. I found myself outside 
the main entrance watching an old wizened-up 
man clean a basket of oranges. His hands 
were excessively dirty and he was polishing 
the fruit with a cloth of unequal whiteness. 
I merely recount these details to give you the 
picture. I was long since used to uncleanli- 
ness in the native. 

The old man exercised a sort of fascination 
over me, he was so small and so active, so 
inordinately like a busy bee flitting over a 
yellow chrysanthemum, the yellow chrysan- 
themum in this instance being the basket 
of oranges. I stood riveted to the ground, 
he all the time sublimely unaware of my 
presence. 

I, in turn, was sublimely unaware of two 
others who stood a little out of my line of 
vision until I heard a sweetly modulated 
feminine voice ask some one if she were not 
tired of standing. I turned quickly toward 
them. The some one proved to be an old 
Manchu lady of seventy or eighty years who 
was smoking a very long pipe. She wore a 
long black coat, the only articles of adornment 
being her silver crescent-shaped earrings and a 

90 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

funny round hat with two. blue streamers 
falHng down her neck. If she hadn't had such 
an extremely grandmotherly look about her 
she would have seemed grotesque. It was odd 
that I should have watched her so long before 
noting the owner of the sweetly modulated 
voice. When I did look at her, it was with 
somewhat of a start, for I was not expecting 
to find such an extravagant type of beauty 
anywhere in China. Good complexions were 
not a rarety. But beauty, in the Western 
sense of the word, one seldom happened on. 

But she was beautiful, and young, and in 
fact everything that the gods adore. Her 
hair was done after the immemorial style. It 
needed but a glance to know that she was no 
longer a virgin. She stood with her hands 
under her outer coat and she was looking at 
me from the corners of her eyes, rich black 
Oriental eyes in which a wealth of emotion 
shimmered. The old lady was as stolid as an 
owl and white-cheeked with age. The young 
woman was the picture of youth and freshness. 
Her cheeks were high and her nose only 
slightly spatulate. Her lips, unlike those of 
most Chinese women, were not straight, but 
the bow of them was delicately curved up- 
wards, and though they were full and sensuous, 
there was no suggestion of pouting; and her 

91 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

chin lay under them with a firm but unobtru- 
sive prominence. 

I said she was smiUng at me; nor is it my 
intention to retract these words. I suppose 
the gayety of the carnival, for all Chinese 
ceremonies partake of the nature of the 
carnival, had somehow gotten beneath her 
skin, making her tingle for the new and 
unusual. I was frankly astounded to see her 
smile, but I had not been smiled at by one so 
beautiful in a weary while, so happily enough 
I quickly smiled at her in retm-n. The old 
lady drew incessantly with little short puffs 
on her long-stemmed pipe. 

I had a premonition that matters would 
eventually draw to a head, which in this case 
meant that I should be left standing there 
alone, watching the wizened man flit over his 
oranges. So when the young woman smiled 
at me again I tapped my camera and pointed 
it toward her, nodding my head quickly up 
and down with only a suggestion of uncer- 
tainty in my eyes. She laughed with hers 
and looked significantly towards the old lady, 
as much as to say, "If you can do it with- 
out her knowledge, you have my permis- 
sion." There was really nothing more to be 
said, so I turned my back on them, adjusted 
my lens for eight feet and, when I thought 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

everything was right, I wheeled sharply around 
and clicked my shutter without so much as 
even raising my eyes. It was the final exposure 
and I immediately turned it through for fear 
I should forget and use it again. The resulting 
picture is the gem of my collection. 

But the incident did not end here. A 
Peking cart stood in the background, and in a 
little while the old lady, putting her pipe into 
a long bag that hung at her waist, walked 
over to it, clambered in and lay down for a 
nap. The last words I heard her say to her 
granddaughter, for such manifestly was the 
relation between them, were, ^^Pieh ts'ou — 
don't wander off." And the young woman 
replied '' Shih/' which is a word of assent. 

As soon as the old lady was safely tucked 
away, the younger one looked me frankly in 
the face and asked, '" Te le mo? — did you get 
it.'*" And then, when I told her I got it, 
she wanted to see it, and I had to explain that 
it wasn't yet ready to see. I added that if 
she would tell me where she lived I would 
send her a print through the mail. But she 
answered that this was out of the question. 
And then we fell into conversation. 

"You are married," I said. 

She looked at me a little sorrowfully, I 
thought, before she made reply. 

93 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

"What a pity!" she said finally. 

"Why do you say that?" I asked, genuinely 
concerned for the natui'e of her answer. 

"I like you," she responded guilelessly. 

"But you must love your husband," I in- 
terjected quickly. 

"It is not necessary," she answered, en- 
folding her fingers diffidently against her coat. 

"That is not understandable talk to me,'* 
I suggested. 

"I was only married to him a week when 
he went off to Peking. If only he had simply 
said good-by and gone, but he spoke many, 
many words of explanation, and his letters 
are all explanation why he does not retiu'n. 
His is understandable talk. He loves another 
woman." She pouted when she spoke this 
last and her mouth was prettier than ever. 
Her face, too, flushed with the admission she 
had made, took on an eminent beauty that 
removed her from any I had seen before. 

"And so you are left alone," I ventured 
solicitously. 

"Yes, alone," she replied. And then she 
went on, "It would not be so bad if I could 
go out and do as he has done. In China men 
make customs and women observe them. I 
am customary but I am not a fool." 

"No, you are not a fool," I assented. 
94 




THE GIRL OUTSIDE TIIK TEMPLE 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

"My old grandmother here watches me Hke 
a hawk. She suspects nothing. She merely 
watches me because it is her duty. A woman 
is always watched until she gets so old; then 
they set her watching somebody else." 

"And the men.^^'* I queried, somewhat 
lightly, I fear. In the light of this fear, her 
answer was distinctly illuminating. 

"You are a man. You know," she said. 

"But how," I asked, turning this thrust 
aside, "how do you happen to have such 
advanced ideas .^ You are the first woman of 
standing I have ever spoken with. The bulk 
of your sisters are feather-brained, — feng nao- 
tzu, a windy head." 

"I read novels that w^ere not meant to fall 
into my hands. The princesses have always 
revolted. Those of royal blood can do much 
against custom and still retain their honor." 

"Yes, that is the way all over the world," 
I answered. 

"But some day, if he doesn't come back 
soon, I shall slip off and find love somewhere. " 

"You don't mean to say you would dare do 
this?" 

"I would do anything to find the love the 
princesses found in the novels." 

"But don't you see, that love was ideal. It 
wouldn't happen exactly like that in real life." 

95 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

"But if I made it happen like that!" 

"But could you?" I demanded, with ruffled 
brows. 

She looked at me rather saucily, it seemed, 
for a number of seconds. I felt a rush of blood 
to my brain. Could this be a Chinese woman .f* 
I had never met her like before. All the 
others had been poor pent-up hearts that did 
not know a single throbbing emotion. But 
this, this one was different. She looked at me 
saucily, I thought, and then sudenly she 
became almost severe. I could nearly im- 
agine her stamping her silken-shod foot, which, 
though small, was fortunately not of the lily 
variety. 

"Could you?" I repeated, when I had re- 
gained control of my senses. 

"What do you think?" she asked, her eyes 
melting with tenderness. 

"You could," I answered at last, feeling 
that for at least once in my life I had been 
true to myself. 

We stood looking at each other for an 
unconscionable time with the little old man 
rustling his oranges close by. He evidently 
had not paid any attention to what we were 
saying. His heart was in the tips of his 
fingers. He wiped, rubbed, rustled, and wiped 
again. 

96 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

The Peking cart creaked ominously and the 
eyes of the young woman froze on the instant. 
The old lady was rousing herself for another 
smoke. I got one last tender look, one that I 
shall always treasure, and then the young 
beauty turned away. Mistletoe, like the nests 
of large birds, hung in all the trees. There 
was a prodigality of the gentle shrub. And it 
mocked me as she walked away. For of what 
use was it in a civilization such as this.^^ Red 
lips, red lips, everywhere, and nary a one to 
kiss. 

The night fell like a quick blanket over all, 
and the blue sky heaved up from the rim of 
the tired world. 



97 



CHAPTER VII 

On the 21st of August, 1917, a telegram 
came into Moukden out of the clearest tropical 
sky I have ever yet known. The skies of 
China are a joy forever. During the summer 
the blue vault shrinks away until it becomes 
the veriest azure mist, like a ceiling seen in 
St. Peter's. In winter it forms a canopy of 
cobalt blue, so near that you fancy you could 
touch it if only you were a little higher up, 
like the farther hills whose peaks seem to keep 
the sky from enveloping the earth. At night 
it seems magically near. But my telegram 
dropped out of a midday sky with the sun 
flaring away toward the zenith and the blue 
forced down until it formed an azure tinted 
ribbon along the rim of the hills. 

The telegram was brief and to the point. 
I was transferred to Tientsin. And being a 
neophyte and not accustomed to dallying with 
authority, that very evening found me south- 
ward bound. For the last time I saw Mouk- 
den, or as the Chinese call it Feng T'ien, Wind 
of Heaven, lying there in the windless warmth 

98 




J'lASV H'ri(,KK'l', 'J'lMNTSlN 




TMMri.n; ()!'' coNKiicins 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

of the morning. The city walls encircled 
everything, and together with the outlying 
Japanese district formed an immense blot on 
the landscape, as if a huge tortoise had crawled 
up from the sea to sleep. The Lama temples 
swayed their jeweled heads as a sign of de- 
parture, and in another instant the hurrying 
shadows had obliterated everything but the 
unending earth. 

Tientsin, or T'ien Ching, means an inland 
harbor. It is the port of Peking, though itself 
situated forty miles inland on the banks of the 
muddy Pei Ho, river out of the north. When 
I got to Tientsin I found that I was not 
expected, so instead of remaining in the foreign 
concessions which, though unique, are a travesty 
on the East, I sought the Chinese city, obtain- 
ing a room in a native inn less than a hundred 
yards from my office. 

The room looked out on the courtyard of a 
temple of Confucius and was at no little eleva- 
tion so that I had a view of the entire city and 
the open country beyond. Since the Boxer 
uprising no walls have surrounded the native 
city. What were once the sites of massive 
masonry are now broad roads with electric cars 
clanking over them. Still it is China, for the 
Chinese are not a superficial people. They 
bend but they do not break. 

99 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

That first night in Tientsin I was no sooner 
settled comfortably in my bed than a horrible 
groaning commenced directly beneath my win- 
dow. I rose, bent far out and looked down, 
but I could make out nothing. I was forty 
feet up in the air and the city pressed in on 
every side; and though I was high above it, I 
felt as if it were struggling about my feet. I 
visualized the turmoil under the hundred 
thousand roofs. I shuddered and went back 
to sleep. 

But sleep was not destined to be my lot 
that night. I had barely extended my limbs 
when the groaning was renewed with more 
vigor than before. Now it was low, like a 
child suffering. Now it rose to a sort of wail, 
like an infant bereft of its mother. And in 
another instant it had changed to a shriek, 
like that of a strong man in a burst of anger. 

I lay there imagining everything under the 
sun. Was some one being murdered under my 
very window, or had they merely been beaten 
and robbed? The sounds came as if from 
the earth. Then I remembered an alleyway 
that ran beside the inn. With this thought I 
jumped out of bed and thrust my head far into 
the night, calling to know what on earth was 
the matter below. I kept up my importunities 
until some one answered and demanded in a 

100 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

raucous voice to know what was the matter 
with me. It was the venerable gatekeeper who 
had been awakened by my summons, and when 
I told him to investigate the alleyway he 
swore wheezy swear-words, as he thought, 
under his breath. I heard him moving heavily 
about. Then in a few seconds he cried out, 
"There's a sick man lying on the ground. 
Na mei shen mo," he said, before closing the 
door of his little hut, as if that was all I 
wanted to know. 

"That's of no consequence," was the import 
of his phrase. And then I realized that I was 
still in the clutches of this pagan monster. 
A man might fall down dying and everyone 
would pass by on the other side until he was 
dead. Dead men smell by and by, so dead 
men are carted away to the tombs. But the 
living can take care of themselves. I in- 
stinctively revolted against such a philosophy, 
but in a world like this, I thought, it is inevi- 
table. Does a man conquer nature or does 
nature conquer man? I was finding myself 
in the throes of a great deterministic fatalism, 
and I rose to the occasion and became a 
fatalist. 

I slept, and in the morning I went to my 
window and looked down. The man lay 
quietly just below. His blue cloak was drawn 

101 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

back and over his face. After all, there was a 
touch of decency in these folk. I saw the old 
gatekeeper emerge from his hut. 

"So he died, did he.^" I called down. 

" Shih, fa ssu lo,'' he answered, his features 
set in a sort of imperturbable grin. 

That afternoon, when I came home, the man 
no longer lay there. The city which repre- 
sented the living had done its last duty by the 
dead. By permutations and combinations I 
decided that it would not recur just there in 
another million years. My sleep was not 
broken again. 

The Pei Ho curls insinuatingly through the 
heart of the city. I write "insinuatingly" be- 
cause every now and then a hut tumbles into 
it, for there is a continual sucking at its banks, 
as if its bosom harbored a selfish demon who 
was jealous of the encroachments of man. 
When a hut tumbles into the river, a quantity 
qf pigs, chickens, and humans tumble with it. 
So the demon achieves a double advantage. 
Not only does he lessen man's handiwork, but 
he diminishes man himself. The river is the 
gay destroyer. Everything foul is poured into 
it, but its stamina is truly wonderful. It 
goes chuckling, hurrying by, to vomit its ill- 
gotten gain into the sea. Man drinks of its 
water and vile pestilences arise, merely a re- 

102 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

turn of evil for evil. But is there then no 
good? The night is a compensation for many 
things. Come onto the river at night. 

I used to take my boat five miles into the 
country. There was a university nestled in a 
grove of acacia trees and I had friends who 
were teachers there. In the afternoon I would 
creep along the vile-smelling banks until the 
city was left behind. There would be a cup 
of tea, rich foreign food with delicious condi- 
ments, and then I would slip into my boat 
again and journey back under the stars. 

The lap of the waters was music in my ear. 
The fresh night air had blown every undesir- 
able odor away. And I reclined on my cush- 
ions breathing in the limpid nectar of evening. 
Little villages twinkled along the banks. Boats 
were continually passing us and we passing 
them. I remember one gorgeous affair with 
uniformed rowers. Light feminine laughter 
reached my listless ears, and I was no longer 
listless. Could this be one of the love boats 
of which I had heard so much, not from the 
mouths of men, but from the pages of olden 
novels? 

There was once a maid on the Soochow creek 
who had been bereft of her lover by another 
beauty. Did she pay him back in kind? Ah, 
no. She put all her savings into a love boat 

103 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

and plied up and down the creek, singing 
silvery songs that charmed the heart of every 
listener. She permitted no man to be with her. 
The love boat was her convent and she was 
singing her life away. 

One evening, when he had grown weary of 
his newly acquired mistress, the erstwhile lover 
heard a song of his beloved coming out of the 
distance. He listened enchanted. Slowly the 
boat came near. And as it went by, he dove 
silently into the water, meaning to swim to her 
and claim her as of old. But the beauty of the 
song had stolen away his senses, and so he 
perished between two loves, the one abandoned, 
the other sought. 

But the river was not always so beautiful at 
night. It had a tragedy of its own, which was 
the more terrible because enshrouded in dark- 
ness. One evening, when we were slipping 
down with the current, I heard a plaintive cry 
not far away. It was the only sound that 
came to my ear, so I was prone to heed it. I 
signaled my rowers to turn their oars against 
the current and then I looked in the direction 
of the sound. 

Silhouetted against the twilight blue of the 
sky stood a woman with a child in her arms. 
She was on the poop of a barge perhaps a 
hundred feet to my right. Near her, towering 

104 




RIVER SCENE, TIENTSIN 




CRIMINALS ON THE WAY TO BE SHOT 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

above her threateningly, was another figure, 
that of a man, her husband and lord, I suppose. 
After a little I could distinguish his words. He 
was rebuking her for having borne him a 
daughter instead of a son. She stood silent 
before him, the child wailing pitifully in her 
arms. The man was intoxicated with his 
grievance. He waved his arms violently about, 
and for a moment I thought he was about to 
strike her. But, after abusing her for upwards 
of fifteen minutes, he turned away. The 
woman stood like one rooted to the earth. Her 
face was bent down to the little face in her 
arms. There was only one way out, and before 
I could utter a cry there was a soft splash and 
the waters had closed over them. 

I lay back with a sickening sense of helpless- 
ness. I was near to murder that night. And 
I never went on the river for pleasure again. 
It seemed as though some one should have 
seen, should have heard, should have pre- 
vented all this. But I alone saw and heard, 
and I was powerless to prevent. The current 
bore me down and I hated it for its urgent 
power. 

My oflSces were in the very heart of the city 
and I could look into the swirl and push of life 
with a minimum of effort. Countless human 
feet drummed and shuffled the face of the 

105 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

earth. There was a continual coming and 
going, and to what end? The feet came and 
went, came and went, and I discovered that 
what is true of this great pagan culture is true 
of the cultures of our Western world. There is 
an eternal evolving, the circle ever expands, 
the source grows dim, but the central force is 
tireless. Man is the end of man, and beyond 
man lies the infinite. 

One Saturday afternoon, while seated lei- 
surely at my desk, I was aware of music 
that sounded strangely familiar. The source of 
the music was a band, and the band was the 
first I had heard since leaving America. It 
was a slow solemn dirge and I could fancy the 
musicians pacing steadily along like men with 
leaded shoes. I listened, and finally the music 
resolved itself into a name. It was Chopin's 
*' Funeral March." 

The afternoon was like a New England 
autumn one with the sky overcast with gray 
clouds and a fresh wind blowing the crisp air 
hither and thither. I looked into the street 
and saw a great crowd moving with a nearly 
imperceptible motion. In a little while a 
cortege came into sight. The band was 
directly behind it, and behind the band there 
walked a number of men in European dress. 
I remembered then that the wife of the 

106 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

president of the university had died. This, 
then, was her funeral. I had seen them 
married, — he a graduate of Harvard and she 
of Wellesley; both of them singularly fine 
Chinese. Had the matter been brought to my 
attention earlier, I should have been walking 
there too. But as it was, I could only look 
with pitying eyes. 

The band passed on and I was about to turn 
away from the window when I noticed a 
second procession come into view. This one 
was headed by mounted soldiers who cleared 
the streets for other soldiers on foot. These 
last bulwarked ten or a dozen 'rickshaws, 
which in their turn were followed by a troop of 
cavalry. The men in the 'rickshaws were 
ill-clad and their faces wore a disheartened 
look, as if they were alone in the world. A 
thousand curious eyes were turned in their 
direction, and search as the condemned men 
would, there was not an eye shedding a beam 
of sympathy. I turned to a Chinese assistant 
at my elbow. He only confirmed my fears. 

By a singular turn of fate Chopin's "Funeral 
March" was doing a double duty. For the 
procession that followed the funeral cortege 
was that of men condemned to die. Death 
walked before the band and imminent death 
stalked behind. The poor wretches who were 

107 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

about to be shot had no ears for music just 
then. But still the music played on, and I 
could hear it long after both processions 
passed out of sight. 

My Chinese assistant, in leaving the win- 
dow, remarked, quite by the way, that an 
old executioner's son was among my office 
force. I demanded at once to be shown him. 
He turned out to be an open-faced boy of 
excellent habits. 

*'So your father is an executioner," I said, 
after formal greetings had been exchanged. 

"^M/i," he replied, bobbing his head awk- 
wardly up and down as Chinese youth will 
in the presence of those they deem their supe- 
riors. 

"But I don't suppose he has much to do 
now. He is an executioner of the old school, 
isn't he?^^ 

"The sword, you mean?" 

"Yes, the sword," I answered. 

^'Shih,'" he articulated again; meaning that 
he gave assent to my proposition that his 
father employed the sword. 

"Tell your father that I shall pay him a 
visit one of these days." . 

-The youth only bowed in reply and then 
almost immediately requested to be permitted 
to go home and inform his worthy father. 

108 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

I had no intention of visiting him that after- 
noon but when my assistant remarked that 
they would be expecting me, I went. 

The old executioner was quite feeble now. 
There was nothing extraordinary about his 
face. I did not expect to find it beautiful. 
And I was surprised not to find it coarse. He 
must have been a big man in his day, for even 
bent over as he was he loomed large in the 
doorway. After chatting in a commonplace 
manner, I asked him if he knew how many 
souls he had freed. 

*'/ ivan ta liao, ckiu loang lo,^' he replied, 
without an instant's hesitation. 

A free translation of what he said was, "I 
lopped off ten thousand; then I lost count.'* 

Under the circumstances I thought his com- 
posure remarkable. Perhaps he was only feign- 
ing. So I put some more questions. 

"After an especially busy day, could you 
sleep well?" I asked. I meant to ask if his 
conscience were not troubled commensurately 
with the number of his victims. But evi- 
dently the old executioner had no conscience. 

"The busier the day, the better I slept," 
he replied, without a suggestion of humor. 

"But weren't you ever bothered by your 
business? Didn't you sometimes feel like a 
common murderer?" 

109 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

The old executioner elevated his eyes at 
this. "I never used the knife," he said. "I 
was offered big pay to do the seven cuts, but 
I washed my hands of torture. No, I should 
starve before I would torture. Only a brute 
will torture." 

"Then the mere business of lopping off 
heads meant nothing to you." 

"Ah, the business; that meant a great deal. 
It meant food for me and my family. But you 
see, I did not allow the personal relation to 
enter into it. I never had dealings with friends. 
As for the others, I saw nothing except a little 
band of flesh. I swung and passed on. For 
such things I have no memory." 

So there was a code of honor among execu- 
tioners! They would not descend to torture, 
but they had no compunctions at killing. 
And, notice, the old executioner never once 
used the words kill or cut. When he said 
"/ wan ta liao,'* he merely "hit" ten thou- 
sand. The rest of it was an affair of natural 
mechanics. It has long been known to stu- 
dents of medical and the allied sciences that 
a man cannot exist separately from his head. 

To illustrate what he meant by murder, the 
old executioner told me the story of a Can- 
tonese governor who was at a loss to devise 
means of ridding his province of lepers. Finally 

UO 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

he hit upon an idea. Inasmuch as most of 
the lepers congregated either in or near the 
capital, he posted a notice to the effect that 
if all the afflicted ones would gather at a cer- 
tain secluded spot, they would have their 
ills attended to after being given a sumptuous 
repast. 

So the poor wretches came until they num- 
bered some three hundred souls. A great 
cellar had been dug in the ground and here 
the tables were laid and heaped high with 
everything good to eat. The unsuspecting 
lepers went down into the cellar, and true to 
his word the governor gave them the banquet. 
Then, without warning, he attended to their 
ills. Several companies of soldiers had been 
drawn up as if for an affair of state. At a 
given signal they commenced firing into the 
pit and they did not cease until there was no 
longer any movement there. The excavated 
earth was shoveled back, and thus was the 
province ridded of leprosy. 

On the one hand I was continually con- 
fronted with the ugliness and squalor of life, 
and on the other with the beauty of pageantry. 
Ordinarily the streets were dull, colorless thor- 
oughfares through which the teeming thou- 
sands ceaselessly poured. But now and again 
they would be lit with Oriental splendor. The 

111 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

funeral processions especially were gorgeous 
contrasts to the humdrum of existence. Some- 
times they were a mile long; the predominat- 
ing color being red. They were brilliant spec- 
tacles and every bit of them was bought and 
paid for. Even the men in white, who wept 
so copiously that their tears wetted the dusty 
earth, received their pieces of silver. 

Almost countless children bore striking ban- 
ners. Musicians and shaven priests contrib- 
uted their modicums of sound and mummery. 
Marvelously carved temples in miniature, the 
deceased's favorite chair with his picture on 
the cushion, triumphal arches with inscriptions 
recounting his achievements and public benefac- 
tions, perhaps his pony or even his dog, — all 
these bewildered the eye with splendid confusion. 

I could almost be glad that some one had 
passed on, so long as the senses of the populace 
were so variously gratified. One day, look- 
ing out of my window, I saw them making 
sacrifices in the Temple of Confucius. I be- 
lieve it was the anniversary of the great teach- 
er's birth. A bullock and two sheep were 
laid upon the altar and then the whole as- 
semblage, resplendently dressed, gathered round 
while priests in yellow robes told their beads 
and made their obeisances to the shade of 
the Immortal K'ung Fu-tzu. 

112 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

It was like passages of the Old Testament 
being rehabilitated before my very eyes. On 
the other side was the Great East Road, where 
thousands were bent on the sordid business 
of filling their stomachs. But here in this 
painted cloister the cares of the world were 
thrust away. The sheer beauty of romance 
dominated everything. If this is not wor- 
ship, I thought, then there is not a God. 



113 



CHAPTER VIII 

Because Hersey Baird, Princetonian and 
wealthy sportsman, had been disappointed in 
love and had come to China to marry a prin- 
cess was no reason why he should want me to 
do the same. But when I met him on the 
steps of the Custom House and he invited 
me to meet the sister of his beloved, I had 
not the heart to refuse him. In the ordinary 
course of events I could never hope to meet 
a princess. Hersey Baird was intending to 
devote his wealth to the founding of a col- 
lege, and I have a suspicion, a very faint one, 
that he saw in me a likely assistant to his 
plans. Had I, too, been disappointed in love, 
there is no telling what might have occurred, but 
I had not then ever fallen in love. And then to 
meet a princess who was all that the name im- 
plies was truly incurring the enmity of the gods. 

That same evening I went to his home. 
But it was only by a turn of fate that I met his 
wife's sister, the princess Ssu-ling. It seems 
that a son and heir had recently come to the 
home. Madame Baird had him brought in 

114 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

for my special inspection. He was an odd 
little bit of humanity with round black eyes 
and silken hair, with his father's nose and 
his mother's lips. His cheek bones were Tar- 
tar, his chin of Mongolian cast. 

In announcing his existence the father called 
him simply a child. Perhaps he thought I 
ought to know that Great Luck would bring 
him a son. But as the facts of the matter 
stood, I was entirely unaware of the sex of 
the little thing. So, cudgeling my brain for 
the appropriate word, I asked the proud mother 
if the child were a cow or a donkey. My mis- 
take was apparent to her at once. I had meant 
to ask if the child were a boy or a girl, but 
I mixed my tones with the above lamentable 
result. We laughed merrily over the mis- 
take and were about to settle into a serious 
conversation when a peal of merriment broke 
on us from an adjoining room. 

My friend had informed me at the moment 
of my arrival that the princess Ssu-ling was 
indisposed and probably would not be able 
to see me. But her indisposition must have 
been singularly temperamental, for no sooner 
did a sense of my error dawn on her than she 
went into spasms of laughter. In another 
instant she was standing in the doorway and 
my soul was in my eyes. 

115 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

The princess Ssu-ling was neither small nor 
large but of such delicate proportion that 
I rather felt than saw the bewitching grace 
of her. Her features, though unmistakably 
Tartar, reminded me of the women of north- 
ern Italy. Her skin was slightly olive, with 
the color flushing through as though she w^ere 
perpetually embarrassed. Her eyes opened 
wide and had a certain liquid quality about 
them so that they seemed like unfathomable 
lakes with the bottoms temptingly near, so 
persistently did they harbor emotions of one 
kind or another. Her blue-black hair was 
parted cleanly in the middle and drawn tightly 
down in two jet braids that lay like woven 
circular mats over her ears. Gold pendant 
earrings dropped nearly to her shoulders. Be- 
sides these, of ornamentation there was not 
a sign. 

She was wearing a long coat of jade-green 
silk with a handsome pattern of embroidery 
fringing it. The sleeves of the coat fell some 
inches short of her wrists, exposing shapely 
arms that tapered into jewelless fingers. Be- 
neath the hem of the coat I glimpsed two 
silken slippers of a color like the sky on winter 
evenings. It was as if the doorway were a 
frame to her, and when she finally stepped 
out of it and advanced to the center of the 

116 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

room, I closed my eyes, for it seemed they 
must be deceiving me. But when I looked 
again, she was still standing there, her head 
bent coyly down, her fingers gently inter- 
locked, as though she were expecting me to 
speak. 

We were presented to each other with a 
minimum of ceremony, though I had imag- 
ined many ceremonious acts. These were 
to be reserved for a later hour, not that night, 
but weeks hence, when she understood my 
faltering Chinese tongue. Soon I discovered 
that she spoke French prettily and this be- 
came the medium of our interchange of thought. 
It was like meeting on a foreign soil. It en- 
hanced the magic of our friendship. 

Just outside the Japanese concession there 
is a large Chinese park, and thither Ssu-ling 
and I were wont to go on balmy summer even- 
ings. In China a park is called a Kuang Yuen- 
tzu, or a place where one may wander. Dur- 
ing the summer thousands of Chinese of the 
better class frequent the Ta T'ien Lou. There 
is a little theater where portions of popular 
plays are staged. It was interesting to watch 
the players strut about, each one, while he 
was saying his lines, occupying the center of 
attention. A servant comes in to announce 
that dinner is being served. This he accom- 

117 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

plishes with an immense flourish, as if the 
denouement of the act depended on the 
right enunciation of his paltry lines. He goes 
off and another takes his place. In a Chinese 
play everybody, for the time being, is a star. 

It is not impolite to talk during a perform- 
ance, though for the most part the audience 
is strikingly attentive. I did notice, how- 
ever, that although people seemed inclined 
to listen they were not so particular about 
looking at the stage. The greater part of 
the time it seemed as though they were watch- 
ing Ssu-ling and me. I could not blame them 
for watching her, and I suppose they thought 
it odd that we should be together. 

Every now and then a little laugh escaped 
her and I knew some subtle turn of the text 
had evaded my knowledge of her tongue. 
When anything particularly pleased her, I 
always requested that she put it in French. 
This she did with a little hesitating lisp in 
her voice, as if there were something she wished 
to palliate in the translation. When she fin- 
ished she would invariably peer questioningly 
into my eyes and demand, " Comprenez-vous?" 
And whether I had or not, I always looked 
searchingly back at her and replied, "Old, oui'" 

After the theater we walked again into 
the open and waited for the fire display. Every 

118 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

evening the management arranged a brilliant 
show of fireworks, the like of which I have 
never witnessed in any other land. Two huge 
posts were placed some ten feet apart and 
extending fifty into the air. Upon a num- 
ber of crosspieces the mystic boxes and papers 
were fixed. I have seen a whole pantomimic 
play in burning colored powder. Men, women, 
and children, fantastically dressed, dropped 
from a point seemingly only a little lower 
than the stars. It was indescribably beau- 
tiful, and as a mere mechanical contrivance 
worthy of the subtlest brains. Rarely did 
the paper images ignite, and then the delicate 
tissues burnt so quickly that unless one were 
unduly attentive he would think it a part 
of the scheme. 

But the portions of the park I shall hold in 
most pleasing remembrance are the rustic 
seats on a little rocky hill overlooking an arti- 
ficial lake. Here Ssu-ling and I always even- 
tually repaired. Here we exchanged our most 
intimate thoughts, and here I discovered the 
magical subtlety of her mind. 

"Did it never strike you as strange," I 
said to her one evening, "that you and I should 
be sitting here together, you a princess and 
I, well, just what I am?" 

"Wo ti Hsi Kung — my western prince," 
119 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

for thus it was that she loved to address me, 
^'Wo ti Hsi Kung, have you so soon forgotten 
the fable of the lonely hearts?" 

"Then it is because you are lonely that 
you permit me these sweet moments?" 

"I was lonely, Hsi Kung, but no longer am 
I so. Do you forget that the blood of the 
Ghargis Khans flows in my veins and that I 
cannot, nor would I, walk with common men." 

"Then the fact of my being a Westerner 
compensates for much." 

"You are like a jealous child, Hsi Kung. 
Because you haven't the blood of the Ghargis 
Khans you despise that which you have." 

"Which is very little, Ssu-ling." 

"Is Ssu-ling then content with so little? 
Your talk changes, Hsi Kung. A little since, 
and the universe was my footstool. Must 
I now cherish only the littler stars?" 

As I had not the language to answer such 
beautiful arguments, we fell to talking of God. 

"What is your opinion of all this?" I asked, 
indicating the starry vault with a sweep of 
my arm. 

"It is more precious than these," she an- 
swered, turning the briefest instant to look 
on the moving sea of faces. 

"More precious than man?" I queried, 
with feigned surprise. 

120 



, ? -4. 




MARKET PLACE WITH SHRINE 




A STUDENT, HIS M^FE AND HIS AUNT 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

"Shall I tell you the story of the aged philos- 
opher who discovered God?" 

"»S7iiA," I whispered, for I was not uncon- 
scious of the solemnity of her thought. 

Ssu-ling leaned forward, her face aglow with 
Vega's yellow light. She spoke in her native 
tongue. It was a simple story, requiring a 
simple language. 

"There was once a sage who employed 
his whole lifetime seeking for a manifesta- 
tion of the One you call God. He wandered 
up and down the faces of the earth, peering 
into the hearts of men, but God was not there. 
Instead he saw evil thoughts, and misery, 
and vile plagues which scourged the land 
as a thresher flails out grain. 

"In his quest he grew to be an old man. 
Finally despairing of the inhabited regions 
of the kingdom, he sought the seclusion of 
the hills and mountains. He had given up 
his quest. His only thought was to find a 
solitary place and die. 

"Towards evening of a glorious day he 
toiled upwards to the top of a thickly wooded 
hill. He was worn and feeble with age. At 
times it seemed unlikely he would reach the 
top. But he did reach the top just as the 
sun was seeking India. 

"He saw a fertile valley lying extended 
121 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

like a carpet of many colors. A little stream, 
a ribbon of silver, glistened far below. Beau- 
tiful plants and flowers clustered in silent 
profusion at his feet. And over everything 
the declining sun shed his impartial benedic- 
tion. 

"The aged philosopher staggered erect, aban- 
doning his cracked and shriveled cane, clasp- 
ing his withered hands in childlike ecstasy, 
while his soul drank in the immortal beauty 
of nature. 

"At last," he cried, "at last I have found 
it. Now I die happy. Surely this is a sight 
for God alone." 

In time Ssu-ling went away to her home 
in the Western Hills. I was despondent un- 
til she told me the Western Hills were a locality 
near Peking. For it is near the Western Hills 
that the old emperors had their summer palaces. 
Here they came to play and escape the affairs 
of state, which must have been very burden- 
some indeed. Through the eyes of Ssu-ling, 
among the last of a noble Tartar line, I 
saw the unparalleled splendor of the Tartar 
city. 

There is not another spot in the world like 
Peking, or the Northern Citadel, to distin- 
guish it from Nanking, which in times past 
was the capital of the south. It is indeed a 

U2 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

Tartar city, for on Peking the northern con- 
querors, the Celts of the Middle Kingdom, 
lavished their wealth and pride and all the 
splendid imagery of their creative imagina- 
tions. The result is a gem as pure and serene 
as the Taj Mahal. 

Had the Tartars continued in power, China 
would never have changed to a republican 
form of government. And there are those, 
foreign as well as native, who deprecate this 
change. For sheer magnificence has its own 
ends. Dress suits and high top hats do not 
alter the hearts of men, but how they affect 
the appearance! 

Gone are the days of the ceremonial robe, 
the peacock plumes, and the splendid raiment 
of the courtiers. But Peking remains, and so 
long as the yellow roofs of the Forbidden City 
flare against the unresisting blue of the sky, 
the traveler will not be at a loss to recon- 
struct the pageantry of a race unfortunately 
dead. The huge gray walls with their towering 
templed gates meagerly herald the beauty they 
seclude. But only pass within, mount to a 
vantage point, and see the gently sloping roofs 
billowing away like an imprisoned saffron sea. 
The yellow tiles are intermittently broken 
with green, and both are only accentuated by 
the common gray of the lesser buildings which 

123 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

cluster around the palaces and temples as if 
their hearts' blood were drawn from them. 

Great avenues, like animated rivers of color, 
flow from wall to wall. They seethe with 
humanity, with a turbulent pagan throng. I 
looked down on them, detached, as if from 
another world. They were not a part of me, 
yet I felt myself caught up by their irresistible 
glamor; for here was man ebullient with 
emotion, hiding nothing, and yet concealing 
all. 

It was rumored that the Empress Dowager, 
that remarkable Elizabethan who rose from 
obscurity to match her wits with those of the 
Western world, had constructed an under- 
ground passageway from her palace to the 
home of a foreign diplomat with whom she 
was wont to pass her time as she would. 
It was even whispered that an accomplished 
ambassador requested his withdrawal because 
the redoubtable empress impoverished him at 
the royal game of poker. It is a pity indeed 
that the great woman did not leave behind 
her a diary, for it would have made a volume 
of mighty reading. Though it were unwise to 
let it go into the hands of the young, who 
might thereby be tempted to emulate their 
queen. 

Until recently the Forbidden City was all 
124 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

that the name impHes. Even now there is a 
nook and corner of it which must be forever 
inaccessible to the world. Here the remnants 
of the royal family dwell; the little Emperor 
for whom various attempts at restoration have 
been made; his uncle and a host of retainers 
who vainly wait and pray for an imperial 
resurrection. A handful of eunuchs still poke 
their beardless cheeks through the princesses' 
curtained windows. But the Forbidden City 
is dead, and dead is the race that might have 
restored it to life. 

The Western Hills, where Ssu-ling had her 
home, are some seventeen miles from the 
walls of the Tartar city. Beyond them lies 
Mongolia and the Desert of Gobi, that Sahara 
of Asia which with the aid of early winter 
winds increases the soil of provinces a thousand 
miles to the south. Ssu-ling's home was a 
little Italian villa-like affair overlooking the 
lotus lake. Far off in the distance a pagoda 
penciled itself on the sky. The multicolored 
roofs of the summer palaces shimmered against 
the green of the pines and the hemlocks. In 
the early days of the empire it must have been 
a veritable fairyland. For even now, with no 
quaint processions moving across the plain, it 
had an atmosphere distinctly unique. 

At night, with the red moon dissolving into 
125 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

yellow over the tops of the hills, there was not 
a more bewitching spot this side of Paradise. 
In the daytime Ssu-ling piloted me about, 
discovering loves long dead, and burning my 
ears with the romances of kings. I saw the 
marble boat, that most ingenious contrivance, 
which is supposedly built of solid stone and 
for aught I could discover is built of solid 
stone. It is pure white and floats gently at its 
mooring. Once it bore the Emperor around 
the lake. Will it never glide over the placid 
waters again? Not unless an Emperor takes 
his ease on the alabaster throne. 

One day we journej^ed back to visit the 
Temple of Heaven. What the Taj Mahal is 
to Agra, the T'ien T'an is to the Tartar city. 
It is still and undoubtedly forever will be a 
mystery whence came these precious stones. 
For the altar is built of spotless marble. 
Thither the emperor yearly repaired to worship 
the source of his power. As a token of royal 
humility he climbed the balustraded steps 
with unshod feet. And to this day a Westerner 
can no better show the fineness of his soul 
than by entering the temple with unsandaled 
silence. That Chinese cosmogonists failed to 
construct a theological heaven should in no 
wise cast a slur on the depth of their creative 
imaginations. Being of a people eminently 

126 




TEMPLK OF HEAVEN APPROACH 




THE AIAJUiLE BOAT 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

practical they saw no need to exercise their 
fancies merely for fancy's sake. What they 
dreamed, they realized. Life was mostly 
ugly. If there were a heaven it must needs 
be brought to earth. And in this instance 
heaven and the fullness thereof is Peking and 
its environs. The T'ien T'an against a purple 
sky! No wonder Orient spells Imagery! 



127 



CHAPTER IX 

Though I did not know it at the time, I 
was never to see Ssu-ling again. Her Hsi 
Kung left her, pressing tenderly his own hands, 
while she pressed hers. For this is the fashion 
in China. I went back to my offices in the 
Tientsin Chinese city, and for an unconscion- 
ably long time I could see nothing but the 
purple rim of the Western Hills with the roofs 
of the palaces glimmering a little way beneath. 
The Tung Ma Lu, or Eastern Road, served 
only to accentuate the beautiful memory that 
was to be forever mine. 

In China time flies with a vengeance. If 
the romantic, the strangely beautiful, was not 
always happening, like the tales in an endless 
storybook, there was much else to captivate 
my fancy. 

One morning I was standing beside my 
window, looking into the bustling street. No 
object in particular claimed my attention until 
I noticed a group, that grew with the moments, 
surrounding a large earthen jar. To call this 
jar simply large is barely doing it justice. It 

128 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

was of the sort in which the thief was con- 
cealed, in the story of the Forty Robbers. 
The man who had proprietorship over it held 
a ladle in one hand. With this he dipped a 
quantity of glasses full of a blackish viscous 
liquid that, even from my second-story win- 
dow, seemed singularly alive. The crowd 
multiplied exceedingly. Dirty yellow hands 
were outstretched for the coveted drink with 
as much noisy clamorousness as other hands 
were once outstretched for water from that 
memorable Black Hole. 

I saw the black viscous liquid rapidly reced- 
ing to the bottom of the jar. Still the crowd 
surged in ever increasing numbers. I must 
act quickly. No doubt this was some famed 
life-giving nectar from a templed spring in 
Tibet. I went precipitately down and elbowed 
my way to the very edge of the cavernous 
dish. No sooner had I looked than I rubbed 
my eyes to make sure that I was not dreaming. 
I was wide awake. The native who held out 
to me a brimming glass of the stuff was no 
apparition. I paid him two coppers for the 
drink and then I poured it carefully into a 
saucer on his stand. 

Could I believe my senses .f' Innumerable 
little tadpoles wriggled over the white glazed 
surface. If a tadpole is born, then these 

129 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

certainly were infants. It was the most 
atrocious instance of robbing the cradle I 
have yet uncovered. But the natives did not 
look at the matter in just that light. There 
was nothing immoral about it to them, though 
in my opinion they were treating their stom- 
achs with dissolute abandonment. 

I can only imagine the good they thought 
they were doing themselves. As ticklers of 
the abdominal palate I can conceive of nothing 
more efficacious than tadpoles, little ones. As 
stimulants to the digestive organs they are, 
for all I know, quite without parallel. But 
until they closed their little eyes in death I 
can't, for the life of me, understand how any 
mortal man. Pagan or Christian, could tolerate, 
even for an instant, a half hundred of them 
chasing their tails around his solar plexus. 
Dead, they might conceivably be palatable sea 
food. Alive, they must be torture, or else 
Nirvana. Perhaps they function so rapidly 
that the total resultant sensation is like re- 
clining on a billowy couch with breezes blowing 
from an emerald sea. 

I have eaten hashish, that delectable Persian 
condiment. I have felt the world and my 
material sense slough off me like dead skin. I 
have experienced utter detachment of body and 
soul, so that the latter ascended in a purple 

130 



'.-'yy,i''//////i^//sVl 



I 7'^W^^m¥¥f^> 




PORCELAIN PAILOW NEAR THE SUMMER PALACE 



|»«ik"' 










LOOKING TOWARD PEKING FROM THE WESTERN HILLS 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

mist and regarded the former with a genuine 
sympathy, not altogether tearless. But I have 
yet to quench my thirst with tadpoles. 

That evening, when I went home, I asked 
L'Americain, my native servant whom a 
French colleague so-named because he re- 
sembled Chingachgook, what he thought of the 
native superstitions. I related the incident of 
the tadpoles, solely to get his reaction to it. 
L'Americain reacted thuswise. 

*'I could never afford the drink myself, 
but I remember hearing my grandmother 
say it was looked favorably on by the em- 
perors." 

"But don't you know why it is looked 
favorably on?" I questioned. 

"Well, it's an old custom that has never 
done anyone harm, and it may have done good. 
I don't know." 

"Why is it that I never happened on this 
drink before.'*" 

"Because it is so precious. I can buy a 
gallon of water for a copper, while this costs 
that much for a glass. It's not reasonable. 
I'm a poor man. " 

"But if you were rich you would drink the 
stuff and be no better for it," I countered a 
trifle sarcastically. 

"The doctors have not yet determined the 
131 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

good of these things," my servant answered 
unperturbed. 

Spinny, the venerable nurse of EngHsh 
friends of mine, herself the mother of some 
seventeen children, maintained that the only 
cure for a toothache was to put a toad in the 
mouth and keep it there till it died. On a 
detailed inquiry I learned that the pain in the 
tooth entered the toad and annoyed it so much 
that it gave up the ghost. One day Spinny had 
a toothache. The wife of my English friend 
endeavored to have her treated by a foreign 
dentist; but all to no avail. Spinny resorted to 
her own devices. Did she put a toad in her 
mouth and did it die.'^ She would not indulge 
our curiosities thus far. I only know that she 
suffered excruciating agonies for two or three 
days when the tooth, manifestly harassed to 
the breaking point by the toad, dropped out, 
and there the matter lay. 

Spinny 's sole justification for this practice 
was an anecdote told her by her mother of a 
princess in the dark ages who was cured of 
toothache in this striking manner. This was 
suflScient. It had happened once. It might 
happen again. Who knows .^^ 

One day, while walking in the narrow streets 
of the older native city, I saw a man lying 
prone on his face, his back bared to the waist, 

132 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

and another fellow, manifestly a doctor, hover- 
ing over him. As the spectacle was quite 
public I had no hesitancy in standing by. The 
man was evidently ailing; he may have over- 
eaten the night before and become alarmed at 
his sudden corpulency. So the doctor told 
him to lie down. When I arrived on the scene 
the quack, for he did not deserve a better 
name, had taken a small knife and was cutting 
little crosses up and down either side of the 
patient's spine. The crosses were of the sort 
we all recall so vividly from the days of vac- 
cination. 

When the blood was flowing freely the quack 
shook a green powdered stuff, made of dried 
herbs and cheap incense, over the bruised 
portions of the skin. Then he applied a match 
to each little pile. The incense flared up with 
green flames. The prostrate wretch wi'ithed 
like a man undergoing torture; whereat the 
quack applied plasters of an unsanitary looking 
nature. This was the end of the treatment. 

It all reminded me of the ancient saw, it 
takes a devil to catch a devil; for manifestly 
this is what the operation amounted to. In 
China everything active is a devil. The one 
exception to this is woman, and according to 
Chinese philosophy she is passive. The other 
exception is man. He is active, but he is not a 

133 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

devil. Wherever pain exists, it is necessary 
that a counterbalancing pain be brought to 
bear. It is unthinkable that little pills, unless 
they contain a narcotic, can palliate, not to 
mention driving away, big hurts. It is a 
child's conception of science, and in these de- 
partments of knowledge the Chinese are, like 
children, vastly amusing. 

One evening I heard the fire bells clanging 
down the street. I looked out and saw a little 
shack, a blacksmith's shop, burning merrily 
only a hundred yards away. I ran down in 
time to see a procession of professional fire 
fighters form a circle round the doomed build- 
ing and commence beating copper gongs sus- 
pended from their necks. In due time a 
terrible racket was evoked. But as the tones 
of the gong sounded louder, the flames went 
higher, and the end of it you can see for your- 
selves. I suppose the firemen thought their 
duty done if they frightened the devil away 
from adjacent buildings. There happened to 
be no wind that night. So the devil did not 
become rampant. Even if he had become 
rampant and razed half the city, the populace 
would not have blamed their priests. Some 
one had done a great wrong, and the fire devil 
simply would not hear to being frightened 
away. 

134 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

Devils are singularly persistent at times, 
but they are not nearly so formidable as they 
look. The bulk of the Chinese are on quite 
intimate terms with them. In fact, they have 
given so much of their time to hobnobbing 
with devils that they have failed to meet their 
creator. If this has made them pagan, it has 
also made them vital. It was not so long ago 
that Christians gave considerable attention to 
the devil, Milton not excepted. But now we 
have lost him, and there seems to be small 
likelihood of getting him back. The Chinese 
have an advantage over us here. They could 
lose a hundred devils and still have a hundred 
more. And personifying evils is much safer 
than abstracting them. If you abstract them 
you are liable to draw all the evil out of them, 
and this is a risky matter. The Chinese fear 
their devils. We don't even fear our God. 

Probably no superstition ever got a securer 
hold on the imaginations of the people than 
the Boxer one. In Moukden I heard my first 
tales of the Boxers, or the Society of the Right- 
eous Fists. I was conversing one afternoon 
with the head of the school for blind girls, 
the one to which I committed my find near 
the Temple of Fertility. This gentleman told 
me of the days when all suspected Christian 
converts were approached by soldiers armed 

135 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

with swords. A tiny slip of white paper with 
the characters signifying Yeh-su, Jesus, written 
thereon was thrust into the suspected one's 
hands. He was told to spit upon it and tram- 
ple it under foot. Failing this, he was cut 
down on the spot. And it was remarkable, 
according to this gentleman, how many were 
cut down. It only served to magnify the 
already great admiration I entertained for 
them. A martyr must always be a noble 
being, even though we pity him. 

Other missionaries told me of riding off 
in the night, their children clutching their 
necks, and of looking back to see their homes 
in flames. The Boxers had conceived the 
idea that the foreigner was a devil and an 
excessively personal one, not at all abstract. 
They complimented him with the name of 
Foreign Devil, and to this day the children 
bawl it at you from the by-streets. Evidently 
the natives tired of beating gongs at the air. 
The lust for blood had been slumbering in 
their veins ever since the Manchus sheathed 
their swords over the Tartar throne. Here 
was an object for venom. But with true celes- 
tial wiliness the Chinese invoked the aid of 
the spirits temporarily abandoned. The mas- 
ter stroke was distinctly a pagan one. 

The Boxers believed that the bullets from 
136 




MONUMENT TO BOXER VICTIMS, RUSSIAN PARK, TIENTSIN 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

their adversaries' rifles were ineffective against 
them. And so long as this belief prevailed 
the work went merrily on. It is recounted 
that a particularly astute leader demonstrated 
each day that all true believers were invul- 
nerable. He simply removed the slugs from 
a number of cartridges, stood the selected 
apostles against a wall a little way off, and 
fired at them in rapid succession. The sim- 
ple folk, who were wont to associate death 
at the hands of a foreigner with a very loud 
noise, were thus deluded into thinking they 
really were immune. Thousands flocked to 
the banner of murder and pillage which cul- 
minated in the sieges of Peking and Tientsin. 
An English lady who was a girl of fifteen 
in those memorable summer days of 1900 
told me how she stood on the roof of her home 
and watched the Boxers dancing outside the 
foreign soldiers' entrenchments. There was 
so little ammunition left that the soldiers 
dared not waste a shot. They were reserving 
everything for the final rush. In the mean- 
time the Boxers worked themselves into a 
stupendous frenzy. The occasional death of 
one of their number in no wise lessened their 
faith in the cause. This woman remembers 
how with other girls, equally reckless, she 
ventured into the native city. Hearing the 

137 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

noise of riding soldiers she dodged into a tum- 
bled hut. She was terror-stricken. She ran 
into something that swung away from her 
and then swung back again, nearly knocking 
her down. When she recovered her senses 
she saw a dead man hanging there with a 
horrible grin on his yellow face. No doubt a 
Christian convert, or perhaps a traitor. She 
did not know. She only remembers turning 
into the open again and fleeing back to her own 
house. But to this day, so she told me, the 
face of that dead man haunts her. She sees 
him in her dreams. 

Then came that never-to-be-forgotten day 
when the women and children were assembled 
in the Gordon Hall, which is the heart of the 
British concession, and the men took up the 
last few rounds of ammunition to await the 
rush that momently was expected. In one 
sense it was harder for the men than for the 
women. As for the children, they enjoyed 
every moment of it, for they had never ex- 
pected to experience in reality the pages of 
Cooper. But there was one thing the women 
never knew until the danger was past. 

The Englishmen had gotten together and 
decreed that when all hope was past they 
would put their dear ones out of harm's way 
with their own tender hands. To make it 

138 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

easier, each man was assigned somebody else's 
family. For never would Englishmen allow 
the ones they loved to fall into the power of 
the fanatic Boxers. It was a terrible resolve 
for men to have to make. But fortunately 
it was not carried out. A rider came through 
to Taku and another sun saw troops marching 
into the city. Thus were the foreigners spared 
a terrible death, for the cruelty of fanaticism 
knows no bounds. The end of summer wit- 
nessed the collapse of the Boxer movement, a 
movement which never will have a rebirth. 
For China is fast putting away her devils, 
an example set her by the western world. 
Who will give her a God? 



139 



CHAPTER X 

From Tientsin it was only an overnight's 
journey into the hinterland. On occasional 
holidays, and others, I slipped out of the teem- 
ing bustle of the Chinese city and ran down by 
night to Shanhaikwan, where the sea, the hills, 
and the great wall come together. Here it is 
that the Manchus commenced their conquest 
of the Middle Kingdom. The great wall, a 
penciled streak of gray pouring down from the 
peaks of the farther hills to bury itself in the 
sea, was supposed to be an impassable barrier. 
But the hardy Manchus constructed a handful 
of ships and simply sailed around, landing on 
the Chinese side. To-day, the obvious antiquity 
of the landscape is the chiefest charm of the 
place, if one except the North Hotel, where the 
opium smugglers from Siberia congregate. 

I always stayed at the North Hotel, where 
great bearded Russians with Japanese wives, 
and Amazon-like women with no husbands, 
but plenty of lovers, seemed to while their time 
away. At ten in the morning they came in 
their outlandish kimonos and Japanese slippers 

140 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

into the main salon, which had a bar in one 
corner and a dining table in another, with 
card tables and couches strewn between. They 
were a motley crowd. But it needed only a 
glass of grenadine and soda to make me one 
of them. 

There was the Countess Korisoff, a ripened 
woman of thirty-eight years who once must 
have been beautiful. Even now she would 
have looked handsome had she been tidy. She 
was a superb blond. When she moved about 
it was with a sort of conscious strength, as if 
she knew she could have given birth to a 
race of supermen but disdained anyone short 
of a god as their father. She spoke in a rich ^ 
mellow voice that caused the nondescripts at 
the tables to drop their cards from their hands 
when she entered the room. And when she 
reclined on her couch and began playing La 
Cloche Solitaire on a little lacquer table she 
had commandeered for that purpose, the rest 
of the company threw up their games in 
despair, and clustered around and over her, 
passing remarks that would have caused an 
average mortal to faint, but whose only 
apparent effect on the Countess Korisoff was 
seen in the parting of her lips to smile as the 
pack in her jeweled hands grew smaller and 
ever smaller. 

141 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

There was also Nikko-san, the Japanese 
mistress of an intelligent Greek, who smiled 
so sweetly on me in the morning when I came 
in to breakfast. I sat at table with her while 
she read my hands. She spoke pretty broken 
Enghsh which she had learned, no doubt, as a 
sindng girl before this Greek offered her a 
permanent attachment. Plentiful jet-black hair 
fell by its own weight to her shoulders, bhe 
wore it parted in the middle, which is not at 
all the Japanese custom. But I hked it best 
that way, for it gave her a look decidedly 
French and so enhanced her attractiveness. 

Because of her beauty the Greek was jealous 
of her and often cast wicked glances m my 
direction. But the Countess Korisoff, who 
could read men hke open books, became my 
constant benefactress in this matter. So long 
as the Greek merely glanced in our direction 
we were safe. But when he lifted his head 
high from his shoulders, and nearly closed his 
eyes, and gripped the edges of the table with 
his wiry narcotic fingers, the countess always 
called out, ''AUention, mes chers." 

The company thought this a signal to gather 
arouQd her couch, but I knew, by previous 
arrangement, that it was intended for our- 
selves, for Nikko-san and me. I can still hear 
that vibrant voice, like a contralto's taking her 

142 




RAILWAY PIERCING THE GREAT WALL AT SHANHAIKWAN 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

pitch, "Attention, mes chers,'' whenever I meet 
with danger. The Greek took Nikko-san away 
one night, and for the rest of my stay I had to 
be content with a Russian ex-oflScer, who told 
me tales of the running. 

Poor Mavromaras, the proprietor of the 
North Hotel, had seen better days too. He 
had vision, but fate abused him cruelly. When 
it became evident that the decisive battle of 
the Russo-Japanese War would be fought at 
Moukden, Mavromaras put his entire fortune, 
two hundred thousand roubles (which was a 
fortune in those days), into champagne, and 
secreted it in a small village bordering the 
battle field. It was his idea, as it was the 
whole world's, that Russia would be victorious. 
But the Japanese won, and a marauding band 
discovered the liquid hoard. The result was a 
riotous debauch, in which two hundred thou- 
sand roubles worth of honeyed nectar went 
down the throats of those who had never 
tasted it before. Mavromaras went back to 
Shanhaikwan, a broken man. But the North 
Hotel attests to his recuperative ability, and 
by the time the next battle of Moukden is 
fought, he may be ready to try the wheel again. 

"What percentage of opium do we get?" 
I asked Kochalski, the Russian ex-officer, one 
evening after the others had retired. By 

143 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

"we" I meant the Chinese customs adminis- 
tration of which I was an executive official. 

He fingered his yellow mustache an un- 
conscionable while before he ventured to 
answer. Looking at me with nearly emotion- 
less cold blue eyes he seemed to be piercing the 
secret places of my soul. Finally, as if satisfied 
that I had no intention of spying, he said 
offhandedly, "Oh, maybe one tenth, maybe 
less." 

"You mean," I returned, "that nine tenths 
of the stuff goes through!" 

"Precisely." And then he added, with a 
humorous glint to his eyes, "Did you really 
believe your administration more successful?" 

"That doesn't matter to me," I said. "My 
interest in the work is not a moral one. Do 
you mind telling me some of the ways it goes 
through?" 

"Probing professional secrets?" Kochalski 
queried. 

"On my honor," I commenced, but he cut 
me short. 

"Well, to tell you the truth, we shouldn't 
get a half of it through, weren't the Chinese 
so amenable." 

"A case of money talking, I suppose." 

"Precisely. In this instance money is more 
loquacious than women." 

144 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

"But the method," I interposed. I was 
sleepy. Kochalski was Siberia bound in the 
morning. 

"Always a simple one," he replied. "The 
bulk of it doesn't come this way at all. We 
operate this line chiefly as a ruse. Do you 
happen to know the treaty rights on Indian 
cotton.?" 

"What has cotton to do with the drug?" I 
questioned blankly. 

"Just this. India cotton, by treaty stipula- 
tion, goes into Shanghai baled. Which means 
that it is exempt from examination. Of course, 
one of your officers can run a steel probe into a 
bale. I must correct my grammar. He may 
run it in, if he can. Did you ever attempt to 
run a probe into a bale of India machine- 
pressed cotton?" 

I wagged my head in negation. 

"Well, it can't be done," he said. "So we 
simply introduce a quantity of the stuff into 
each bale. Did it never strike you as odd that 
so much Japanese cotton is transshipped to 
India, re-baled there, and finally consigned to a 
treaty port? Every one of those bales carries 
opium or worse. But that is the big method. 
The lesser ones are more amusing." 

"If you are not too tired, go on," I inter- 
calated. 

145 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

"Hardly a coal tender goes through but 
what contains, buried far beneath the coal, a 
bit of coagulated poppy juice. We give the 
engineer and stoker a number of pieces of 
silver. Nature does the rest; human nature, I 
mean. Why are so many Japanese women 
traveling up and down the line? Because they 
have such a gorgeous sufficiency of hair. Being 
accustomed to carry burdens on their crowns, a 
mere matter of a few ounces of the drug is 
easily met. Soldiers' rifles have many advan- 
tages. The muzzles can be plugged and so cut 
off the smell. What is your English word for 
smelly?" 

"Pungent," I replied. 

"Well, opium is exceedingly pungent. Give 
me a windless night and a pound of opium 
within a quarter mile and it's mine. Of course 
there are a hundred ways of concealing the 
stuff. You can think of most of them your- 
self. But the great lubricant of the trade is 
silver, much fine silver. Now if you were an 
ordinary officer, instead of an official, I might 
make you an offer." 

"Make it, anyway," I suggested. 

"Would twenty thousand a year strike you 
as being small?" 

"It would keep me in cigarettes for a millen- 
nium," I countered jestingly. 

146 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

"We won't wait that long. Have one now." 
He extended towards me a black damascene 
case with a gold dragon engraved thereon, and 
I selected a gold-tipped Russian smoke that 
made my senses swim before I lighted it. 
WTien I recovered them Kochalski was gone. 
So I smuggled myself to sleep. 

Had the opium trade ever been one half so 
bad as the missionaries picture it, China would 
have long since been lulled to a dreamless 
sleep. By the conscious reformer the slightest 
evil is magnified until it becomes an all- 
embracing sin. So far as I have been able to 
determine, opium has never had the effect 
on China that beer has had on the Germans, 
or absinthe on the French, not to mention 
whisky, which is now openly prohibited, on the 
United States. I always had a desire to draw 
on an opium pipe. It is one of the few pleas- 
ures I have never had, and perhaps when I go 
to my last couch I will call for the heart of a 
poppy which is said to bring heaven to earth. 

An eminent member of the Republican 
cabinet one day journeyed toward the south. 
No one thought anything of this. In China 
cabinet ministers are constantly traveling. In 
fact, they do little else. But when this par- 
ticular statesman reached Shanghai, his move- 
ments, or rather the accessories to them, be- 

147 



THE CHAKM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

came, so to speak, public property. His lug- 
gage amounted to some thirty pieces. And 
twenty-two of them were packed as snugly with 
raw opium as if they had been made expressly 
for the drug. As the cabinet convened rather 
suddenly that week, this statesman hurried 
back to sit with others as scoundrelly as he. 
If those high up act in this wise, what can be 
expected of the poor devils who live by the 
trade .f^ Which reminds me of the manner 
editorials read in our modern papers. Pagan 
China and Christian America, which is to be 
interpreted. The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea. 

One clause of a treaty respecting the seizure 
of opium reads that whenever a quantity of 
drug is seized, the container and all adjacent 
articles thereto shall be confiscated with it. 
This gives rise to some delicate situations. 
One morning I was sitting in my office specu- 
lating as to which of a number of ponies was 
most likely to win the Champions Sweep when 
I heard a timid knock on the door. I took my 
feet off the desk, rustled my sack coat onto 
my shoulders, and said in a responsible voice, 
"Come in." I was, to say the least, thoroughly 
unprepared for the sight that met my eyes. 

A handsome slip of a girl, wearing something 
that resembled an antiquated evening dress, 
crossed the threshold dragging after her a 

148 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

youngish man in a suit of yellow pyjamas. He 
wore an astrakhan hat and carried a fur-lined 
coat on his arm. It was the middle of July. 
The man could not speak a word of English or 
Chinese or French or German or Latin. So I 
turned to the woman for an explanation. She 
spoke excessively broken English, interspersed 
with Russian swear-words. 

Little by little the story came out. The 
train by which they had arrived was the early 
one. They had been awakened just outside 
the city and searched. Both of them were in 
bed at the time. The customs officer uncov- 
ered some twenty pounds of morphine in their 
bags, and, remembering the words of the 
treaty, he had confiscated everything in sight, 
the bulk of which was clothes, — shimmering 
lingerie, stiff cavalry boots, coarse woolens, 
and no end of little things. The result was 
indeed lamentable. The girl and the youngish 
man were put to the necessity of coming to me 
just as they were. It is fortunate the night 
had been cool. Otherwise I might have seen 
the second Garden of Eden enacted before my 
eyes. 

The girl pleaded for their clothing. Tears 
were in her eyes and I would have accommo- 
dated her in any possibly way, but treaties are 
not made by Englishmen to be broken. The 

149 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

best that I could do was to offer to write a 
letter to her consul (they both were Russians) 
and hope that the weather would continue 
mild. The man gesticulated wildly when she 
told him how powerless I was. But the girl 
gave me a tremulous smile through her tears 
and dragged her impassioned companion into 
the lobby. That night I started to learn the 
Russian language. 

Late one afternoon in August of 1918 a 
Hsun-pu, or revenue soldier, came into my 
office with his mouth all shot away. The 
bullet must have been a large one, for it had 
sheared off his teeth as if they had been so 
much wool. He babbled to me unintelligibly 
through his bleeding lips what he deemed a 
pitiful story. A Chinese writer, a particularly 
astute man, gave me the gist of the tale. 

The Hsun-pu knew his duty and did it, but 
at the cost of his teeth. A big fat Chinese 
general, than whom nothing is bigger or fatter, 
had contended that, being a general and very 
much removed from common men, he was 
not subject to search in the usual way. The 
Hsun-pu, whose nostrils were untowardly sensi- 
tive, became rightly aggressive. I can picture 
the big fat general sitting there with his boots 
off and his feet curled under him like a josh. 
No doubt his breast was gleaming with medals. 

150 




A EIVEK PIKATE AT HOME 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

Some of his nails were long so that when he 
brushed his face it was with the heel of his 
hand. Then he would scratch his close-cropped 
head and blink with swinish contentment. 

But the Hsun-pu was obdurate, and in the 
end the general had drawn his Mauser and 
taken a pot-shot at my Hsun-pu's head. It 
was quite a random shot, merely raking the 
poor fellow's teeth. The general was forcibly 
pacified by foreign officers and there the 
incident ended. My Hsun-pu was not like 
Spinny, who put toads in her mouth. He 
submitted to being tortured by an American 
dentist, and at the end of the month came in 
to show me two rows of false gleaming ivories. 

But if this Hsun-pu was a heroic fellow and 
richly deserving of the thirty cents' increase in 
his weekly pay, I had another who played me 
utterly false. I had suspicions of him, so one 
night I ordered a raid on his quarters. The 
result was truly astounding. Besides bringing 
to light three huge chests of gold and silver 
ornaments, jade earrings, and American twenty 
dollar gold eagles which the natives especially 
prize, we uncovered beneath a maze of costly 
silks two little girls from Ningpo. The Ningpo 
girls are famous for their beauty, and my 
Hsun-pu, whatever his other faults, was a 
connoisseur in women. The little things were 

151 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

not so frightened as they seemed. TJiey told 
nie quite openly that they had been bought for 
eighty silver dollars. Since there is a Customs 
Administration in Ningpo, we ordered their 
1)51 rents to buy them back again. Tliis was 
liard on the i)arents and harder on the girls, 
for no doubt tliey were severely beaten and 
sold again for a price much lower than eighty 
silver dollars, which, after all, is a lot of money 
in (Thina. 

The llsun-pu was merely discharged. The 
manner in which he had acquired his fortune 
amounting to some seventy thousand taels is 
not uninteresting. Willi others he liad watched 
native snuigglei-s go into shops and buy their 
modicums of drug. When they came out again 
they were seized, their purchases, usually 
opium, taken forcil)ly from them in the name 
of the law and turned over to my Ilsun-pu, 
who himself liad a ready market for the stuff. 
It was a beautiful game, without a flaw in it 
but over^prosperity. The Ningpo girls had 
dis[)l;iy(Hl loo many golden trinkets, some one 
lijid bal)bled, and it came to my ears. The 
big odicials in Peking acquire fortunes in a like 
manner, but, as in our own country, it is 
always safer to al)SCond with a million than 
with a loaf of bread. 

I had early impressed it on my chief outdoor 
152 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

officer that he was to apprise me whenever a 
river raid was phinned. So it was with a quite 
agreeable thrill that I heard him say a large 
quantity of drug was expected on a junk that 
evening. Ordinarily a junk is not searched till 
it passes a harrier, but in this case special 
information had been given and a dozen men's 
veins were a-tingle. Quite sizable rewards were 
made for seizures. It was the only legitimate 
way the men had of augmenting their salaries. 

It was one of those sUu-ry moonless nights 
when the city was asleep and I could hear the 
bells of tlie hawkers tinkling far over the 
countryside. We took a sninpan, or small 
boat, and skirted the crumbling bank for up- 
wards of two miles. There were a thousand 
other craft on the river so no one gave us 
particular attention. We all wore Chinese 
long coats and soft hats, the raggeder the 
better. Every man of us was watching for a 
junk displaying a yellow light on her bow. An 
adventurous Ilsun-pu had marked our prey. 
Those aboard were delightfully unaware of 
the innninence of the law. 

Junk after junk we passed, and always we 
peered for the sign of a yellow light. One 
native expressed the opinion that the light had 
gone out. The current, he said, should have 
borne the junk down river long before this. 

153 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

His argument struck me as being so likely that 
I turned to see who he was. A suppressed 
"Ai-yah" was wafted gently to my ears. I 
turned at once, and there, looming out of the 
lower darkness like a giant of night, rested a 
huge junk with a little yellow light gleaming 
just under her bow. She was at anchor. Her 
crew were probably below, completing arrange- 
ments for hauling the booty ashore. 

We drifted quietly to the stern, but, try as 
we would, we could not prevent our sampan 
striking the hull with a grating noise. Quick 
as a flash naked feet paddled to the side, a 
peering yellow face was thrust downward into 
the darkness, and a hoarse voice called in a 
whisper "Shuif* One of the Hsun-pu an- 
swered, "It is us. We have lost our oar. Get 
us another one quick." The ruse worked. 
The naked feet paddled toward the bow. It 
was our chance. 

As one man we clambered noiselessly over the 
side and hid ourselves in the shadows on the 
deck. A big Hsun-pu awaited the return of the 
native with the oar. He came dragging his 
burden, his head bent down. With one hand 
clapped over his mouth and the other pressed 
at the nape of the smuggler's neck, the Hsun-pu 
picked him bodily from the deck and set him 
before me. 

154 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

"Hold him until we get safely below," I 
whispered in Chinese. "Then drop him in the 
river." 

I drew my pistol and led the men below. 
There was really little danger except from 
knives. The odors from the hold were appal- 
ling. It seemed impossible that humans should 
exist in such a place. 

From a near by corner came the sound of 
clinking silver. I looked penetratingly in that 
direction until I could barely make out a light 
glowing duskily through a sort of burlap 
wall. In one moment we had surrounded the 
musty curtains. In another we thrust them 
aside. 

Prone on the floor were three immense 
coffins, over which six or seven nearly naked 
men were laboring under the orders of one only 
a shade more clothed than they. The men 
were binding the coffins round and round with 
a kind of oiled silk. They might have been so 
many Egyptian undertakers sheathing mum- 
mies. At sight of us they leaped back against 
the beams, their black eyes quivering with 
fear that fast turned to hatred. Their chief 
stood stolidly without a smile. 

^'Yao shen mo?" he muttered finally. "What 
do you want.-^" 

"Up to the old game, eh," returned my 
155 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

chief outdoor officer, who seemed to recognize 
the man. 

"Old game; what old game?" asked the 
wily native. 

"Come on now," said my chief, "open up 
and it will go easy with you." 

"Corpses smell," returned the native sneer- 
ingly. The half dozen Chinese coolies against 
the wall leered with delight at this witticism of 
their leader. 

"So they're corpses, are they.^" my officer 
laughed. 

For answer the native chief motioned two of 
his men to open the middle box. The outside 
ones were already swathed. Sure enough! 
When the lid was removed nothing more than 
the shriveled face of a very old man met 
our eyes. My officer bent his head down and 
rustled his hands up and down the corpse. He 
straightened as if satisfied. 

"And the others are the same, I suppose," 
he said, with an affected sincerity. 

^' Shih," replied the native leader. "A boy 
and an old lady." 

"The whole family, eh," quickly returned 
my chief. "What a coincidence!" 

And then he took his six-shooter from his 
coat pocket. His eyes no longer had a kindly 
glint in them. "Open them up," he shouted, 

156 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

and to leave no doubt as to the intent behind 
his words, he emptied his pistol into the un- 
resisting coffins, but not before I had covered 
the glowering natives with mine. 

"Open them up," my chief repeated threat- 
eningly. 

The Chinese smuggler shrugged his shoulders 
despondently and signaled his coolies to com- 
ply with my officer's demand. 

It was but the work of moments to rip off 
the filmy silk and pry the lids from their 
places. The sight that met our eyes was good 
to see. The odor from eight hundred pounds 
of raw Persian opium rose to our already 
jaded nostrils. As one man we involuntarily 
rushed forward. All except the smuggler. 
Wrenching my officer's pistol from his hand 
the wily Chinese dashed into the darkness. I 
heard six distinct clicks of steel against steel 
as he scrambled up the ladder. Then, dis- 
gusted, he threw the weapon into the hold and 
splashed over the side for the shore. 

It was easy to dispose of the others. They 
were put to work carrying the two coffins that 
mattered up to the deck. Had they let them 
fall, there would have been a number of broken 
legs, for the coffins were great oaken affairs 
that could withstand the elements for a hun- 
dred years. In the end the poor coolies were 

157 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

turned over to the local magistrate and prob- 
ably beaten. The opium was taken down river 
and put under lock and key until a date was 
assigned for the burning. And there the 
matter lay. 

The smuggler no doubt is still commandeer- 
ing corpses for his nefarious trade. Ordinarily 
the dead are respected. But in China they 
have a utility all their own. 

My French friend, Holstein, an eminent 
Chinese scholar, loved to recount the early days 
of his service. The first document that came to 
his hands, he said, was inscribed with the fol- 
lowing words, "Please pass coffin with corpse." 
Which struck me as being much ado about 
next to nothing. 



158 




CH'IEN MEN GATE, PEKING 




IN THE HEART OF THE WESTERN HILLS 



CHAPTER XI 

Transfer was ever hanging in the air. To- 
day here, to-morrow there. China was big 
and vibrant with Hfe. Every locahty had a 
delectable charm of its own. One city was 
famed for its women, another for its landscape, 
and yet a third for its food. I had grown to 
look on the north as my home. I knew it 
intimately. The western hills, the Manchurian 
plains, the Mongolian steppes with the Great 
Wall pulsing twixt earth and heaven, the 
tortuous yellow rivers and the uneven roads, — 
all these were more than names to me. They 
were hearts beating in sympathy with my own. 

But China was not yet completely mine. 
The Devils and the Gods connived at their 
latest scheme. To begin with it struck me as 
altogether devilish. But I learned to look on 
it as a gift from the lesser angels. I was at 
Peitaiho, the Newport of the north China 
shore, passing the summer of 1919 with friends. 
Every hour of it had been heaven-sent. We 
were a little colony of exiles. The sea, that 
precious element that ran out to kiss my own 

159 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

New England shores, lay in front of us be- 
calmed. Over the rim of the distant hills at 
our backs China glowered. We were glad for 
this moment of quiet. It was like breathing 
mountain air. 

On the 29th of July, my commissioner, 
Percy Romilly Walsham, one of the finest 
English gentlemen I have ever known, whose 
father. Sir John, was a distinguished British 
Ambassador to China, intercepted me in the 
middle of my dreams with the news of my 
transfer to Mengtsz. Mengtsz! The very edge 
of the world! For Mengtsz was a couple of 
thousand miles to the south, not far from 
Burma, and near the heart of the Tonkinese 
jungle-land. Mengtsz (pronounced as it is 
spelled) meant the tropics. The north had been 
beautiful but nature was not luxuriant there. 
She did not spill over like a full goblet of rich 
red wine. But Mengtsz! I began to dream 
and my dream fell short of true. 

I coasted down to Hongkong, that British 
paradise of the sea, where the twinkling lights 
on the Peak at evening shine like the lower 
stars. At Hongkong I boarded the Andre 
Lebon, one of the big Messagerie Maritime 
liners, that has had the distinction of turning 
turtle and being righted again. Speedily we 
cut our way towards the Hainan Sea, a 

160 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

diminutive ocean that lies with treacherous 
invitingness between South China and Singa- 
pore. In itself the Hainan Sea hardly deserves 
such an unworthy adjective. But the creatures 
that it harbors are the most treacherous ones 
of the deep. For the Hainan Sea is infested 
with sharks, huge sportive fellows that race 
along with the ship with all the frolicsomeness 
of dolphins. Let merely a loaf of bread be cast 
on the waves, and there will ensue an angry 
rush that will cause the beholder to tremble. 
Once I saw such a rush when two sharks 
somehow inadvertently bit into each other. 
Their own blood spelled their doom. For their 
fellows, enraged by the reddened waters, 
rushed on them with bristling mouths. I have 
seen Manchurian dogs act in a similar manner 
when one of their number went down. 

In the center of the Hainan Sea there is a 
sand bar, and on the sand bar rests the rusting 
hull of a little tramp. I have seen such sights 
in profusion along the Florida coast. But this 
one has a history. In the winter of 1917 a 
batch of some sixty coolies was being trans- 
ferred from Hongkong to the Straits Settle- 
ments. They must have been huddled to- 
gether like cattle, for the tramp was not 
much larger than a tugboat. In a rolling sea 
she grounded off the bar and the heat from 

161 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

the sun set fire to her bunkers. The warmth 
becoming unbearable, the coohes flung them- 
selves into the sea and made for the sand bar, 
only a hundred yards away. The water was 
barely over their heads. The majority of 
them soon were wading through the long swells 
of the surf. But only seventeen reached the 
bar. The sharks made merry havoc with the 
others. I w^atched the forsaken tramp until 
it melted into the early glow of evening. It 
charmed me as a snake charms a bird. Then 
I turned shudderingly below. 

That evening we congregated in the smoking 
room of the Andre Lebon. There were a 
Boer from Johannesburg, an Englishman from 
Hongkong, an American rice merchant from 
San Francisco, and a New Englander. The 
talk, when it had done with women, drifted 
on to books. The Englishman, it seems, had 
made a find. The Boer w^anted something to 
read. So the Englishman came to the rescue. 

"Try 'Treasure Island,'" he said. "It's a 
new book, published by Kelly and Walsh of 
Shanghai. It's recent and it's interesting, I 
bought it to read on the trip." 

"'Treasure Island,'" returned the Boer, in 
a reminiscent sort of voice. 

"Yes, that's it, 'Treasure Island,'" affirmed 
the Englishman. 

162 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

"But my mother read me 'Treasure Island' 
thirty years ago." 

"Here's a lark," laughed the Briton. "Boys 
shall we put him to bed.'^ Perceival, you've 
been nursing the bottle alone. It's not 
fair. I thought we'd agreed to get drunk 
together. " 

"Laugh, laugh!" returned the exasperated 
South African colonist, "but I tell you my 
mother read me 'Treasure Island' with me 
in her lap." 

"What a big baby!" interpolated the smiling 
Briton. "Wait! I'll get the book. " 

In a moment he was back and displaying 
with sublime confidence the imprint, 1917. 

"There," he said. "Do you want anything 
more.'' 

"But, man," returned the Boer, whom I 
was kicking desperately under the table, "this 
is merely a reprint. The old edition's run out, 
so they set up a new one. " 

"No, I tell you it's a new book," insisted 
the Briton, who by this time was himself 
beginning to be annoyed. And then he de- 
manded quickly, as if from inspiration, "Who's 
king these days, anyhow.'^" 

"Why, George!" replied the Boer with 
unperturbed perplexity. 

"Then look here," said the Englishman, 
163 



THE char:m of the middle kingdom 

with an air of finality. He had opened "Treas- 
ure Island'' to chapter three, The Black Spot, 
and indicated what he wished the Boer to 
notice with his fingers. "Read those words," 
the Briton said. 

"And God bless King George," the Boer 
read aloud. 

"Well," said the Briton, wagging his head 
\'indictively, "doesn't that prove * Treasure 
Island's a modern book.^" 

Some one, maybe it was I, tipped over a tall 
brown glass at the critical moment, so the 
Boer forgot to answer. No doubt, when he 
thinks of it, he still puckers his shaggy brows 
and wishes his dear old Dutch mother were 
alive to vindicate his memory. 

Later in the evening it devolved that Ber- 
nard Shaw had gone down on the Titanic. The 
Boer laid a thousand pounds that he hadn't. 
The Englishman countered weakly. And as 
the Boer looked as though he had a thousand 
pounds and the Briton did not appear to have 
any we decided to break up the party. On 
the morrow I would have need of much energy. 
For the jungle was at hand. 

Early the following morning the great ship 
was alive with nearly naked little men who 
had come off from the shore in their funny 
boats to help discharge the cargo. When I 

164 




'1^^- 

!•!' 




THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

got up the Andre Lebon was lying at anchor in 
the most beautiful stretch of water in the 
world. The surface of the sea was heavy- 
like mercury, and of a color like the purest 
jade. Not a ripple was to be seen, and the 
ocean impressed itself on me like an immense 
tepid bath. 

On every side black pillar-like domes rose 
out of the bay much as seals raise themselves 
from their rocks. They stretched interminably 
one behind the other, until all distinct outlines 
were lost in the intricate mazes of the Baie 
d'Along. The Baie d'Along is a veritable 
catacomb of the sea. Many a venturesome 
traveler has wandered into its beautiful wind- 
ing ways never to return. The calcareous 
domes were covered with a greenish flowerless 
plant, making a line of them look like a giant 
hedge with a vista of lesser green below. From 
a distance they were indeed enchanting. Soon 
I was to wind my way among them. 

Standing at the foot of the grand stairway, 
watching the passengers clamor round the 
purser's window, I saw five of the little savages 
clinging to one another's arms like lost chil- 
dren. Some ofiicer had ordered them to search 
out a certain box. They had lost their way. 
Considering the stairs as an avenue of escape 
from those who were not of their kind, they 

165 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

flitted up to the landing, where I beheld the 
funniest sight I have ever seen. 

At the head of the landing, where the grand 
stairway divided, was a huge mirror, resplen- 
dent from its early morning polishing. The 
little men, who had never seen themselves 
before, were rejoiced to perceive five others 
coming their way. Their safety, they thought, 
lay in numbers. So they ran forward, crashing 
into the gleaming glass which hurled them 
mockingly back. But the little men were 
persistent. Could they not plainly see their 
comrades? They skirted the mirror as one 
skirts the face of a cliff, their brownish hands 
flitting over the smooth surface like wings of 
butterflies. I did not laugh then. I was too 
keen on seeing the outcome. But I have 
laughed many times since. Their beady eyes 
glistened with terror. 

Flit, flit, flit w^ent the little brown hands; 
ten naked feet paddled the oaken floor. For 
aught I know they might have been flitting 
there still had not a French officer happened 
along, a man who was not so humorously 
inclined as I. He took in the situation 
at a glance. '^ Sacre," he muttered between 
clenched teeth as he hit the nearest dwarf 
with his powerful open hand. The savage 
went down in a tumbled heap on one of the 

166 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

side stairways. When he hfted his head from 
somewhere near the pit of his stomach he saw 
the stairs mounting before him. With the 
nimble agility of the ancestors whom he so 
closely resembled he ran on all fours to the 
top. The others almost immediately followed 
him and so were lost from sight. 

Within fifteen minutes my trunks were low- 
ered to a launch on which a dozen or more 
passengers of all sorts and descriptions had 
already gathered in mute despondency. I 
did not know, like they, that the ride to Hai- 
phong, which lay on the edge of the jungle, 
was a matter of some nine hours. The deck of 
the launch was iron and painted red. There 
were no seats or even chairs. The black fun- 
nel, with the heat waves billowing away from 
it as ripples follow the splash of a stone, rose 
up in the center, piercing in its heavenward 
tilt a very dirty awning several sizes too small 
for the deck. But I went down with the others, 
and soon we were steaming up the Baie d'Along. 

As we passed near the rocky domelike for- 
mations that reared themselves from the water 
like blunted Cleopatra's Needles I was able 
to observe them closely. I noticed small 
brown furry animals about the size of beavers 
scurrying from top to bottom. I imagine 
they were some kind of otter, for they could 

167 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

not have existed entirely on these islets. Had 
there been any means of recovering the skin 
I would have shot one out of curiosity's sake. 
But as it was, I had to leave them scurrying 
up and down between the little green plants. 

Near the heart of the Baie d 'Along a diminu- 
tive Gibraltar raises its calcine head. The 
head falls away to jagged shoulders, which 
in their turn slope to a gentle beach. In the 
bow of the beach I detected innumerable 
little crosses that glittered white in the sun. 
The waters were waveless here and the crosses 
looked like so many reflections out of the 
sky. I inquired of the French helmsman as 
to what they might be. Thirty years before, 
he said, a party of priests and explorers who 
had lost their way in the Baie d'Along were 
captured by savages, taken to the little white 
beach and eaten. Months later their com- 
rades found their bones glistening as the crosses 
glistened now. What the savages had left 
the birds had plucked. So the bones were 
buried where they lay, a cross for every skull. 
I counted seventeen of them before an inter- 
vening islet shut them from view. Was ever 
cemetery more ghastly or more romantically 
beautiful .f^ 

The eye soon tires of sweeping expanses 
of color. The liquid green below, the cobalt 

168 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

blue above, with the islets fluttering between, 
only served to lull me to sleep. The deck was 
scorchingly hot. I had not a place to lay my 
head. So I snatched a rope from a near-by 
davit and tied one end of it to the rail. The 
other I noosed around my neck with a knot 
that did not slip. Then I lay back with my 
weight against the rope, all toppled up like 
a dying crane. In this manner I came to 
Haiphong. 

Bach Tha Buoy, the administration's agent 
to whom I held a letter, met me at the wharf. 
He was an enormous man of indifferent na- 
tionality. He had a face like a hawk's and 
hands like talons, the latter rendered unsightly 
by erysipelas of the joints. We went to his 
office, a tiny cluttered hole on the outskirts 
of the town, where he held me fascinated 
with his talk for upwards of two hours. He 
knew everyone, everything. He had grown 
up with the country. For aught he knew he 
had been born in this very place. But he did 
not know. Bach Tha Buoy knew about every- 
thing but himself. He was what might be 
termed an objective talker. For this reason 
I found him delightfully refreshing. 

Not far from Haiphong, which lies on the 
river of that name, is the most interesting 
jimgle-land in creation. Here the notorious 

169 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

prince T'ai Nam held undisputed sway for 
more than forty years. He barred every effort 
of French aggression. So the French despised 
him and put up a reward of twenty thousand 
francs for his head. Tonkin is a French pro- 
tectorate, though nominally still Chinese. It 
contains the worst climates in China. No 
wonder the colonial French invariably go to 
the dogs. 

But T'ai Nam! Regiment after regiment 
was sent into the jungle maze, and regiment 
after regiment never came out again. Occa- 
sionally a half-crazed tortured soldier drifted 
back to the town after weeks of wandering, 
to tell a tale that made strong men whimper 
like children when the colonel's orders \vere 
read. The country of T'ai Nam billows away 
to the sky like an emerald sea. The first regi- 
ments went in with colors flying and bands 
playing as if to a carnival. The fresh look 
of the jungle beckoned to them with fairy 
fingers. The feather palms dipped their heads 
like daisies. The monkeys clattered on before 
them, leading them to cocoanut groves and 
honeyed springs. In, in the regiment went, 
with the wily T'ai Nam always skipping just 
beyond reach. His camp fires were always 
burning. But like a child who, tiring of a toy, 
crushes it with his foot, so, in the end, T'ai 

170 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

Nam turned back to commence the ghastly 
slaughter. 

I can see the machetes and the curling kukris 
doing their deadly work. Nothing is more 
terrible than an invisible foe. What a mock- 
ery of God nature had become! The green 
foliage bristled with death, silent and swift 
and sure. Rifles were thrown to the ground 
after the first desperate shots had been fired. 
There was no way out. The circle did not 
expand. And when his work was done T'ai 
Nam skipped merrily away to strike the border 
again and again, until another regiment was 
sent as fuel for his pagan lusts. 

But T'ai Nam is no more. Like most men 
of his kind he met an inglorious death at the 
hands of a Chinese as wily, but not wilier 
than he. The Chinese was a poor, clever man 
to whom the twenty thousand francs loomed 
like a fortune. He went into the jungle and 
after innumerable hardships attached himself 
to the prince as a secondary cook. In time, by 
his assiduity and invention, he became chief 
of T'ai Nam's culinary household. Seven 
long years he had waited for his chance, — and 
death. For T'ai Nam had a misgiving of ill- 
fortune on the particular morning that his 
cook decreed he should die. But the prince 
was a valiant man. He would not belittle 

171 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

himself before his people. So he invited his 
cook to eat with him. The poor Chinese could 
not well refuse. Whatever way he turned, 
the die was cast. They died together like 
two hilarious comrades, neither willing to let 
the other know his innermost fears. For the 
cook had poisoned the food. 

The French Government did rather nobly, 
I thought. They paid the reward to the wife 
of the native hero. She did not do as nobly 
by her spouse as the government did by her. 
She married a local gaming lord who squan- 
dered her fortune in a week. But the name of 
T'ai Nam, like that of Nero of Roman fame, is 
imperishable. The evil men do lives after them. 
No good was interred with T'ai Nam's bones. 

Because of the miasmatic pestilential vapors 
that envelop the Namti valley by night the 
trains only run in the daytime. When the 
railway was building natives' lives were snuffed 
out like so many candles. "For every wooden 
sleeper there's a human one," were the words 
of Bach Tha Buoy. And he further told me 
that a foreign engineer laid down his life for 
every third of a mile. 

"How many miles long is the railway?" 
I asked him with pertinent emphasis. 

"Oh, about four hundred and eighty," he 
said, shuffling a pile of papers. 

172 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

Those whom the vapors did not greet with 
their deadly kiss were the victims of tigers 
and serpents. Bach Tha Buoy himself opened 
the collar of his shirt for me and displayed a 
clean white scar that ran from a point just 
beneath his chin, curving down to his kid- 
ney. 

"A man-eater.'^" I questioned with bated 
breath. 

"The old fellow himself," answered Bach 
Tha Buoy. "He was not after me though. 
It was the poor devil beyond me he'd selected 
for his breakfast. Odd how stubborn these 
dumb brutes are. A tiger will single a man 
or a bullock from a crowd and bowl over a 
dozen others to reach his prey. I was in the 
line of his leap. He merely scratched me as 
he went past. I had always been interested 
in my anatomy. I had a good look that time, 
though I could not help regretting the beast 
chose the right side of me. Had he chosen 
the left I might have viewed my heart. What 
a unique experience to view one's heart!" 

"Yes," I assented, "it certainly would be 
unique." 

At Hanoi, the next town above Haiphong, 
two lordly tigers are held in picturesque cap- 
tivity. They had not been captured as cubs. 
They were full-fledged man-eaters when the 

173 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

final entrapment came. Nor were they mere 
nondescript wanderers. They were held strictly 
accountable for their meals. The children 
(I numbered myself among them) gathered to 
hear an old lady talk rather ungently at the 
one who swallowed her son. The lady cursed 
and the tiger roared, and we merely looked 
on. It was an auspicious introduction, I thought, 
to the jungle. 



174 



CHAPTER XII 

The long jungle train sweated and steamed 
like an impatient horse. A crowd of natives 
who should have been securely in their seats 
were looking at the engine. No doubt they 
thought it somehow mysteriously endowed 
with a soul; but whether with that of a devil 
or of a god they were not reasonably sure. 
Its blackness with the circle of red round its 
belly suggested a devil. But, on the other 
hand, there were all the gold-like ornaments on 
top; and it breathed vapor instead of fire: 
it must be a god. 

The engine, with its eight little wheels 
particularly fashioned for climbing, paid no 
heed to these conjecturings. It showed its 
utter indifference by suddenly blowing its 
nostrils at the crowd. The natives scattered 
like monkeys at the approach of a python. 
Whether the iron monster was devil or god was 
of no immediate concern so long as their lives 
were endangered. A panting sound followed 
the blowing of the steam, and then the natives 
knew it was a god. For a god, as everybody 

175 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

knows, gets easily tired, whereas a devil is 
tireless. If you don't believe this, only con- 
sider the evil in the world. The natives were 
right. The engine was merely a god, an object 
to be venerated but not feared. 

Without warning the guard blew the three- 
minute whistle shrilly. The natives tumbled 
into the coaches, which is a euphemism, like 
sheep being driven to slaughter. The majority 
of them had arrived at the station an hour 
before the train was scheduled to go. But 
pending the three-minute whistle they had 
been strolling amiably about the platform, 
chatting like gentlemen of leisure and attending 
to everything but their business, which was to 
see that their baggage was safely aboard and 
that they had a sufficient amount of food to 
tide them over the jungle. 

Before the guard blew his whistle, a little 
nickel one that he wore amulet-like about his 
neck on a silver chain, the platform presented 
an orderly appearance. It might even have 
been mistaken for a fashionable promenade. 
Things move slowly in China until an extrane- 
ous force is brought to bear. The guard had 
not exhausted a fourth of his pulmonary ca- 
pacity when the station became a riot of noise 
and movement. An American stock exchange 
at its frenziedest is dull in comparison. 

176 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

Natives tore hither and thither, shrieking 
Hke madmen. Children were knocked down 
and beaten under foot. Whole families with 
third-class tickets were insisting to be let into 
second-class compartments. It was not suf- 
ficient that the guard should deny them this 
privilege. He had to explain the entire phil- 
osophy of railroad procedure, enforce upon 
their minds the dissimilarity that lay between 
the hovels they were wont to inhabit and the 
quite unparalleled comfort afforded by seats 
that were set in a row. In the end he con- 
ducted them, when he had shrieked himself 
blue in the face, to the exterior of the coach 
and there pointed out the significance of the 
number on their pieces of pasteboard and a 
like numeral printed in gold on the side of 
the car. 

Venders of food and drink lined the train, as 
if they had been so many relatives bidding 
their friends farewell. Coppers were thrown 
out of the frameless apertures serving as 
windows and food was tossed up in exchange. 
There were a thousand wild gesticulations and 
grimaces as buyers and sellers quibbled in 
terms of fractions of less than a penny. It 
would seem that the tumult and the shouting 
could never die, so insistently had it begun. 
But finally, group by group, the venders 

177 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

disposed of their wares and shuffled con- 
tentedly off, counting their silver. 

Family after family trundled into the third- 
class coaches and settled noisomely down, like 
ducks that have finally found water. A hand- 
ful of French soldiers who were relieving some 
comrades up the line made a place for them- 
selves in the second-class car. They brushed 
the natives aside like dogs, tumbling them out 
of their seats as if they had been so much 
baggage. They were only exercising the right 
of the conqueror. The natives did not even 
glower in return for this pleasantry. Nor did 
the French soldiers glower: they only laughed, 
as if the entire affair were a joke, which, from 
their point of view, indubitably was the case. 
The natives moved on to vacant seats, perhaps 
to be later tumbled out again by a fresh batch 
of soldiers. 

For a couple of hours we drew steadily into 
thicker vegetation. At first the palms and 
rank jungle grasses had been far away, to be 
seen like oases from a distance. But closer 
and closer they crept, until I could distinguish 
the frayed silky network of the lower trunk 
and the dead brown tips of the bended leaves. 
The fan palms rose above the feather variety 
and topping all swayed the lordly coco. When 
the train took the steeper grades and barely 

178 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

crept along, I swung from the steps and 
snatched a block of bananas from the golden 
ear. Grapefruit shone higher up, like the 
forbidden fruit, in its insipid green. Inter- 
spersing the larger trees, the luxuriant bamboo 
bristled its needle leaves. At the foot of the 
trees rank yellow grasses and ferns grew huge 
sword-like blades. It is underneath the matted 
tops of these last that the tiger and leopard 
tread their runs to the springs. 

Occasionally we struck an opening and I 
saw a group of huts with dried banana-leaf 
roofs nestling among the palms. At one point 
a farmer was plowing a rice field that lay under 
water. I could just see the great bullock's 
head with his glowering eyes, like a moose 
swimming. The farmer stood in water up to 
his armpits, steadying the plow. Higher up a 
group of bullocks grazed off bamboo shoots. 
Black birds hopped up and down their backs, 
pecking, pecking, pecking. A child of four 
years sat between the horns of a cow. When 
the birds came too close, he shooed them 
away. His legs were bare and beaks are 
sharp. He was already somewhat of a man. 

At the stations along the way I had an 
intimate glimpse of the bhang-chewing An- 
amese. The women wore black flowing trousers 
and white blouses, and a stiffly coiled cylinder. 

179 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

like turban. The turbans served to protect 
their heads from the jars of wine and baskets 
of fruit they carried in this manner. How 
incessantly they chewed and spat! Their lips 
were red and their teeth black, and when they 
opened their mouths to talk I could think of 
nothing but Baa, Baa, Blacksheep. The 
brown earth was spotted with betel-nut spittle. 
The Anamese blacken their teeth because they 
think both to preserve and beautify them by 
this practice. Some of the women were 
beautiful until they opened their mouths. 
Then it became Baa, Baa, Blacksheep, until 
weariedly I turned away. 

The men were similarly clothed, except that 
in addition to blouses and trousers they wore 
black slippers. They were more modest than 
their wives. When I first heard the Chinese 
language proper I thought it queer. But the 
Anamese tongue struck me as hopeless gibber- 
ish. Presumably it has much in common with 
southern Chinese, for there are eight distinct 
spoken languages in China. But Anamese is 
really difiicult to acquire. There are about 
four hundred words in it, and all of them 
mean everything. I don't wonder the colonial 
Frenchman becomes chronically choleric. 

Back of the farthest line of feather palms 
live the savage folk, who, to tell the truth, 

180 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

are not half so barbarian as a Saturday night 
crowd in Scollay Square. By pony I have 
passed as many as twenty tribes in a day; 
all speaking different languages, and each 
having an ungovernable propensity for blowing 
poisoned arrows at the others. Outside of this 
they gather up the fruit as it drops from the 
trees, make beaded garments, rope-shoes and 
rush mats, which they bring into the settle- 
ments to barter. I have seen a Miao woman 
refuse a silver dollar for a pair of shoes because 
she had set her heart on an empty bottle. 
Nor did she want the bottle to smell of it. 
Her nostrils were keen but Columba was not 
her Saint. The bottle was a prize because it 
was both reliable and transparent. Glassware 
did not originate with savages. 

But these jungle folk are diffident little 
people who have inherited from the Middle 
Kingdom their belief in the foreigner's evil eye. 
Once I came across a cluster of huts buried 
deep among the palms. Had not the stallion 
I was riding scented another I should never 
have discovered them. Foolishly I looked too 
long. A child caught sight of me, a girl of 
some seven years carrying an infant on her 
back. She bolted into the nearest hut, shriek- 
ing like one possessed. I should have gone, 
but I waited until a crowd formed in the 

181 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

center of the little village. Certain tales I 
had heard suddenly coming to mind, I, too, 
bolted. Later on I rode that way again, and 
after waiting nearly an hour for some one to 
appear, I cautiously approached the nearest 
hut. But there was no need for caution. The 
village had been abandoned, and all because 
my evil eye had cast itself among them. 

The French Government had reason to 
know what superstition meant. It appro- 
priated three hundred thousand francs for the 
building of a road some twelve miles long. 
The road was to lead off the government 
highway to a native village in the jungle. It 
was an arduous task, costing much money and 
many lives. When the road was within two 
miles of completion the French engineer thought 
he might as well confer with the village chiefs. 
So a delegation went forward to find that the 
town had moved twenty miles up river. Again 
the foreigner's evil eye! Mohamet cannot 
always reach the mountain. 

Coming to Mengtsz was in reality getting 
back to China. Though the jungle had been 
beautiful, Anam itself did not impress me. 
Everywhere the hand of the conqueror was 
evident and the people seemed to be suffering 
from repression. Life naturally is too easy for 
the Anamese and they have not yet recovered 

182 




A RUIN LEFT BY THE BOXERS 




A FARM HOUSE IN THE MENGTSZ VALLEY 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

from the impact with civiHzation. Cultm-e for 
the masses comes high. It takes a long time 
for races to harden their hands to the plow and 
the spade. Civilization is a cruel mistress 
unless she have a lord. Leaving the jungle 
was like quitting a maelstrom of the vege- 
table kingdom; arriving in Mengtsz like being 
pitched headforemost into the animal one 
again. 

Four o'clock in the afternoon of September 6 
found me on the rear platform of the little 
mountain train, shading my eyes as I gazed 
down and away to Mengtsz. All that day we 
had been running through luxuriant forests, 
and steadily climbing. At one point the 
glittering rails seemed on an embankment over 
our heads. After the passing of an hour, in 
which time we had threaded devious tunnels 
and bridged yawning caverns, I was astounded 
to look down at the spot we had traversed an 
hour before. Almost imperceptibly the vege- 
tation thinned until we left it altogether and 
shot onto the smooth red soil of the plateau 
which slopes to the plains of Yunnan. The 
city was barely distinguishable, with the gray 
walls nearly concealing it. But on the left I 
noticed a patch of green. White walls inter- 
mittently came into view, and the whole was 
set apart like an emperor's tomb. 

183 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

The station at which I disembarked to en- 
train again for Mengtsz is known as Pishihchai, 
or Flea-Infested Spot. Pishihchai sits like a 
variegated bowlder on the mountain side. 
Below the toT\Ti a lake, like a piece of fallen 
sky, mirrors clouds. Beyond the lake are 
mountains looking into Burma. Henri Cloarec 
was there to meet me. He was to be my 
colleague in exile. We ran to each other as 
children will in the dark. 

Unlike most Chinese cities, Mengtsz has 
practically no subm-bs. On the west and north 
sides, to be sure, a handful of earthen huts 
frowns at the color-seeking eye. But, for the 
greater part, the city and its pagan throng are 
swallowed up in the inwardly leaning walls not 
more than twenty feet high and quite scalable, 
as a robber band once learned. Skirting the 
lotus lake, at the farther end of which flourish 
banana groves and the Red Pagoda, I came 
to the customs compound and my home. 

For this was the patch of green I had de- 
scried from the distant plateau. An enterpris- 
ing American commissioner, whose assiduity 
was commensurate with his vision, twenty 
years before had planted eucalyptus trees, and 
now they had grown to lordly heights. My 
bungalow-like house snuggled beneath them. 
In the evening magpies slept in their tops, and 

184 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

quite often a flock of egrets wending home- 
wards from the paddy fields did me the honor 
of dropping their precious plumes at my feet. 
The leaves of the eucalyptus trees scented the 
air, so that rising in the early morning was a 
pleasure. But oftener I just lay in bed and 
breathed. 

The longer wall, w^hich was whitewashed and 
topped with red, separated my gardens from 
the French consulate, where a few hundred 
rifles and forty thousand rounds of ammuni- 
tion were stored against an emergency. The 
shorter wall, which was completely buried in a 
bamboo hedge, cut me off from the Banque de 
ITndo-Chine. The other two walls offered an 
obstacle to thieves and wandering pigs. They 
did not, however, prevent a snow leopard from 
astonishing me one morning. He lay in the 
heart of the bamboo hedge, whither I had 
lofted a golf ball on the preceding afternoon. 
Like all felines he disliked being prodded. 
With a disquieting snarl he leaped out and 
bounded into the lesser shrubs, where he prob- 
ably lay until darkness. He was too beautiful 
to destroy. 

On a certain Saturday afternoon in the latter 
part of September I walked for the first time 
into Mengtsz city. There was nothing new for 
me to see, although Mengtsz is quainter, being 

185 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

founded on a knoll, than most Chinese metrop- 
olises. So I took one of the quiet roads leading 
along the little toppling wall, where only 
children play and where massive temple bells of 
solid bronze hang from the lower limbs of pine 
trees, with nothing but the wind to sound 
them. The temples were here, too, but I saw 
no priests. It was for all the world like the 
Street of the Dead in Pompeii, and I almost 
expected the children to run up to me, as the 
little beggars do in southern Italy. 

The walls were brown and moss-covered like 
old tombs. The street was paved with flag- 
stones, and the tiles of the temple roofs were 
gray; so it was not remarkable that I should 
have been attracted by a splash of moving 
color. It was a lady, daintily appareled, walk- 
ing with mincing steps, though her feet were 
not lily ones. Her head was nearly obscured 
by a pink parasol with flat top and dropping 
sides. Two little girls romped along with her 
like attendant spirits. 

The lady passed me, her eyes bent to the 
pavement, though I fancied I saw the glimmer 
of a smile about her lips. Then one of the 
little tots fell and lay crying, the other danc- 
ing merrily ahead, unheeding. So I stepped 
quickly over and righted the chubby darling, 
whose eyes were blinded with tears. When 

186 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

she saw me she became instantly sober, disen- 
gaged herself from my hands, and sped to join 
her playmate. She clutched at the lady's dress 
and stood walking backward, gazing at me 
with smiles, while the other child recounted 
the incident to the lady. 

I saw the latter stop, with a sort of arrested 
motion, like a line gliding into a point. Then 
she turned her head ever so slightly and 
regarded me, peering up between the edge of 
the parasol and her shoulder. Her face was of 
exquisite mold and amply framed by her hair, 
which lay in almost negligent neatness over her 
cheeks, making her look like a more animated 
Mona Lisa. She regarded me wonderingly for 
a moment before permitting her features to 
form a smile which might have been one of 
surprise, though I interpreted it as recogni- 
tion. 

"^Hai-tzu p'eng fou lo mo?" I asked tremu- 
lously, fearing she would not answer. "Did 
the child bump its head.^" 

"Mei p'eng lo fou lo," she replied in the 
negative. And then she added, "Kei lao-yeh 
hsieh-ti to lo — the honorable Sir has my sincer- 
est thanks." 

"Ch'i kan, ch'i lean — don't mention it," I 
answered, as she turned to go. 

I stood watching her, waiting for I knew not 
187 



THE CHAEM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

what. The children \yere constantly turning to 
look at me. and I could see she ^Yas speaking 
with them. Just before they made a bend in 
the road the lady tiu-ned and lifted her head 
coquettishly. But I felt this was to give me a 
view of her face, for she smiled friendlily as she 
passed from my view. 

The tenth of October, marking the eighth 
anniversary of the Republic, was chosen by the 
local general as a day on which the district 
might do him honor. So he opened his spa- 
cious gardens in the heart of the city to the 
populace, all of whom crowded thither, not so 
much to honor him as to taste his food. I 
attended in my official capacity, and had the 
pri\'ilege of shaking the general's hand and 
being complimented on my knowledge of the 
language. Foreigners in China are always 
being told that they speak excellent Chinese. 
Such parlance makes easy conversation and is 
not provocative of A^iolence. From courtesy I 
remained by the general's side while he probed 
my private affairs. The last question he put 
to me, when he learned I was going home, was, 
"Chao hsi-fu ch'il pu chao mo? — are you going 
in search of a wife.^" Thinkinsr this a likelv 
opportunity to get done with commonplaces I 
answered. " ShiJu'" — meaning that I was. The 
General smiled on me approvingly and buried 

188 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

his face in a bowl of tea. Whereat I sHpped 
into the gardens. 

Except it be a bevy of laughing girls and 
smiling women, there is nothing prettier than 
Chinese gardens with their quaint little stone 
mountains and porcelain pagodas and artificial 
lakes with goldfish flecking the surface. I had 
long since learned that the Chinese gentler sex 
was amenable to appreciative eyes. So it was 
not without a certain definite intention that I 
sought the gardens. Custom forbade the wives 
and daughters to mingle in the sanctuary of the 
men. Perhaps for this reason the latter elected 
to wear those gorgeous ceremonial robes, now 
mostly the delight and the despair of envious 
occidental eyes. In excluding woman man 
knew he was hiding his choicest gem, so he took 
to himself as many of her piquant colorful 
ways as he could and yet retain his sex. The 
robes and ceremonies and elegancies of official- 
dom compensate for much, but they can never 
compensate for woman. 

They were standing in groups of threes and 
fours in the shelter of apricot and potted lemon 
trees. When I passed near them they hung 
their heads or hid their faces behind silk fans, 
their eyes dancing with significant but silent 
thoughts. Had their mothers and grand- 
mothers been with them they would not have 

189 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

ventured even to smile, but would have ap- 
peared as if stricken motionless with fear. 
They were enjoying their moment of liberty, 
and being intoxicated with freedom and the 
desire for natural expression, they smiled. But 
not at me directly. They smiled to each other; 
even the virgins of twelve and fifteen years, 
catching the utter abandon of the occasion, 
stamped their pretty feet from the sheerest 
ecstasy. They cuddled against the silken 
sheen of their mothers' garments, and the latter 
joggled them with feigned solemnity. 

I enjoyed it as much as they, but I knew 
better than to do what I should have liked to 
do: approach them with a mode of speech. I 
had learned from experience that even where I 
knew them I could make practically no head- 
way. For often, until the utter futility of it 
impressed itself upon me, I had attempted to 
make conversation with these feminine folk. 
Had I happened on one alone, it would have 
been altogether different. It was not that they 
feared me but rather because of the common 
sentiment supposedly prevailing among their 
kind. In the first place it is not modest for a 
woman to pass the time of day with men. 
And, secondly, though man would like to have 
her, custom has decreed that woman is not 
intelligent enough to converse in a worth-while 

190 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

way. Politically speaking, this may be true. 
For my own part I have found the talk of 
educated Chinese women every whit as intelli- 
gent as that of the average run of their hus- 
bands. Then too, the Chinese women, know- 
ing how ardently their husbands adore modesty 
are prone to humor them in this respect. A 
case plainly of the weaker bowing to the 
stronger; but it has its virtues as well as its 
defects. 

I sauntered by group after group of alluring 
damsels who did me the honor of blushing as 
violently as they could whenever I caught 
their eyes. It was early evening and the sub- 
dued glow of the Chinese lanterns served only 
to enhance the beauty of their faces. They 
were clothed brilliantly, and with an apparent 
disdain of the spectrum, for every conceivable 
color was in evidence and yet all was in good 
taste. The black hair and the gentle features, 
the slight fairy forms and dainty feet could not 
help but be adornments to the most extrava- 
gant colors. 

The average Chinese woman is not physically 
so appealing as the Caucasian. At least, to 
begin with, one is not aware of her physical 
charm. First she exudes a spiritual vapor as 
enticing as it is mystifying. The Chinese 
women wear their souls on their sleeves and 

191 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

have not thereby become less pure. But their 
bodies, those despotic organs of man which so 
often are his masters instead of his servants, 
are hidden away in mazes of shimmering silk, 
so that beautiful women radiate spiritual ema- 
nations, which, strangely enough, are far more 
seductive than physical ones. The latter are 
understandable and can, to a certain extent, be 
appropriated, but the former torment the soul 
and enervate the body with only the compen- 
sation of a dream. 

I noticed behind an artificial hill an extrava- 
gantly dressed woman kneeling beside a hollow 
rock and dipping her fingers in water that 
bubbled in it like a spring. She was alone, 
though at a little distance stood a maid holding 
a scarf in both hands. Neither of them saw me 
at first, but as the lady turned to rise she 
caught sight of me in the shadow and instantly 
knelt again. I heard her say to the maid, '^Pieh 
teng wo, ni Wo i ts'ou ¥an jen ch'il — don't wait 
for me, walk about and watch the crowd." 

The maid was only too glad for this chance 
to gossip with her kind, and immediately 
flitted away. I stood quietly in the shadow 
watching, for I was not sure that the lady had 
seen me, or, even so, I could not guarantee that 
she had not also seen somebody else. So I 
waited until she turned her head in my direc- 

192 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

tion. She was smiling with a certain restraint. 
Then she went on dipping her fingers in the 
pool, her voice startling me with this song: 

'*Hsi jen fa wang lo wo, 
"'Hsien ts'ai hu hsiang wo, 
" T'a hsiang fa hsi kuo ku, 
*'Wo hsin-li hua lo.'* 

"My Westerner's forgotten me, 
"He thinks of me no longer, 
"He dreams of his western love, 
"My heart is melted away." 

When the song ended and her voice trailed 
into a high falsetto, I came quickly out of the 
shadow, for I thought, nay, I was sure, I 
recognized her identity. But could it be? 
Yes, it was no other than the lady of the 
pink parasol. She had recognized me early in 
the evening and had taken this means of 
attracting my attention. After passing a few 
commonplaces I asked her her name. She 
replied, "Pak-koi." And then I learned that 
she owed her comparative liberty to being a 
teacher in a girl's primary school. We chatted 
pleasantly for a while, so pleasantly, in fact, 
that I wondered if I should ever have that 
pleasure again. 

193 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

To this end I asked her about her honorable 
household. 

"Fw shang ts'ai na'rh chuf — where is your 
palatial abode?" 

"My humble hut's inside the city near the 
little southern gate," she answered. 

"Chia chuan yu to hsiao jenf' I asked. 
"How many people are there in your house?" 

"I live alone," she replied. 

"Then you are not married?" 

"Oh, no. I find an independent life more 
charming." 

"Then I may call some afternoon for tea?" 

"The master would not presume to leave his 
palace for my miserable quarters." 

"Wouldn't he, though?" I returned in 
English. 

When she asked me what I said, I found 
myself unable to render this phrase in idio- 
matic Chinese, so I said, "iVa shih Nin-na 
shuo ti hua, wo yao lai — that's your way of 
putting it. I'll come." 



194 



CHAPTER XIII 

My dappled stallion carried me into the 
plains, then up to the verge of the hills whence 
I had a glimpse of the jungle flowering away 
to the south. I rode through smallpoxed vil- 
lages where all those not dead were living. 
By which I mean that so long as there was 
life it called for ceaseless activity. There 
was no laying it gradually down, as the suc- 
cessful man does in the Western world. It 
was work, work, work. Death was deliver- 
ance from work. No wonder these pagan 
peoples are stoical in the face of sorrow^! The 
children ran about their games with scaling 
faces. My pony shied at a corpse. In an- 
other moment I had passed through, not think- 
ing of danger, and only keen for the glories 
that lay beyond. 

Titian should have known these hills. They 
are nearly mountains. I rode to the foot of 
them in the early glow of evening. The red 
soil caught up light from incarnadined clouds 
and burned an impassioned crimson. Peasant 
women, carrying bundles of hay, flared in 

195 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

their blues and greens like gems on a Raja's 
finger. 

One afternoon de Lusignan, a Britisher, and 
I went riding dui'ing harvest. It was nearly 
dusk when we rode back between the waving 
grains. Little thatched shelters set on stilts 
w^ere the only signs of man. These were look- 
out posts for watchers of the grain. Not a 
human did we see until we came to a rocky 
road where we dismounted to lead our ponies. 
De Lusignan remarked a native squatting on 
an embankment. The native was smoking 
his long pipe with quiet stolidity. The only 
movement discernible was in his hand and arm 
which shuttled slowly back and forth as he drew 
the pipe from his mouth and put it back again. 

"I'd give a dollar to know what he's think- 
ing about," said de Lusignan. 

"If you gave a penny, you'd be paying 
too much," I answered quickly. 

And I believe truth was in my words. The 
native was tired and worn. The day's work 
was done, and he had gotten out of the bustle 
of men to have a quiet smoke. There may 
have been a pinch of opium in the bowl. This 
was no concern of mine. He was the picture 
of intellectual blankness and physical con- 
tentment. I would not have had him think 
for worlds. 

196 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

An official envelope, an invitation from the 
magistracy of Kotchiu to visit the tin mines, 
was brought me one morning by a squad of 
soldiers. Quite by the way, as a sort of post- 
script, I was informed that the governor would 
allot me a hundred armed men for a guard. 
It looked as though I were being done exces- 
sive honor until I mentioned the matter to 
de Lusignan, who, as a representative of the 
British American Tobacco Company, had often 
traveled in the hinterland. He explained that 
the guard was accorded me because of the 
robbers who at that time were unwontedly 
rampant. 

"You see, it's like this," said de Lusignan. 
"If you're shot, a big how-do-you-do '11 re- 
sult. The governor's not taking chances on 
a government official." 

"Then you don't think I'll get shot," I said. 

"Not unless a sharpshooter pots you from 
the hills," de Lusignan answered. 

With this last thought tingling in my brain 
I set out one morning with my hundred soldiers 
straggling in front of and behind me. I noticed 
that most of them wore their cartridge belts 
upside down, and on inquiry learned that 
this was to keep the lead from dropping out. 
Occasionally even, the lead drops out when 
the trigger is pulled. But more often it stays 

197 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

put. It is a notorious fact that nearly four 
rounds of ammunition are allotted the Chinese 
soldier for target practice each year. I say 
nearly four rounds because, when deductions 
are made for graft, only about a round and a 
half are left for consumption. The remem- 
brance of this was consoling. If the Republican 
soldier gets only a round and a half, what 
chance has a mere robber .^^ I thought. Later 
on I had this question answered in rather a 
practical manner. 

It was nearly nightfall when we came to a 
wooded hill and my Chinese companion said, 
"This is the spot where they had a battle last 
year." 

"A battle.?" I queried. 

"Between robbers and our soldiers," the 
Chinese explained. 

"Oh," I replied simply. 

I thought a moment before I asked him, 
"Do you think there is any likelihood of our 
being attacked .5^" I was really hoping for a 
skirmish. 

"You had better loosen your pistol," he 
answered without hesitancy. 

We came to the top of the wooded hill with- 
out mishap, but when we reached the other 
side I heard the sound of scattered shots. It 
was quite dark now. Riding back to look 

198 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

down on the plain we had so recently quitted, 
I saw a flare of red against the evening sky. 
With the aid of binoculars I made out a group 
of burning huts, possibly a mile away. 

"They are attacking a village," said my 
Chinese companion. "No doubt they saw our 
soldiers and waited till we got by." 

"Can we do nothing.''" I asked. 

"No. We ourselves may be attacked higher 
up. Why should we risk our heads for theirs .^^ 
We may have need of them before we reach 
the mines." 

As this was incontrovertible logic I said 
no more. I had been too long in China to 
want to interfere with business not ostensibly 
my own. But I could not beat back a wave 
of pity for the defenceless villagers. Poor 
people! They had done nobody harm. But 
because the government had not paid the 
army, some big fat official having appropriated 
the funds set aside for that purpose, the soldiers 
had taken their welfare into their own hands, 
absconded with rifles and ammunition, and 
begun to exemplify that well-known Western 
formula "The world owes me a living." 

On my return to Mengtsz I learned that a 
notorious robber chief had been captured and 
was to be publicly executed on the following 
Saturday. The city was tense with excite- 

199 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

ment. It became tenser on Saturday morning 
when it learned that the chief's confreres had 
scaled the city walls and forcibly lifted their 
leader. They had also lifted the souls of about 
fifty government soldiers, the prison guards, 
who learned to their sorrow that there was 
not so much distinction as excitement in guard- 
ing a robber chief. In China death is always 
exciting. 

Jarland, the French military doctor who 
conducted a native hospital in one of the near- 
by fields, was always asking me down to see 
the machinery of a story. And in and about 
Mengtsz the most exciting stories had to do with 
the robbers. Perhaps it was only a local thief 
who had climbed into Jarland's compound 
and climbed out again, guarding his exit with 
a knife bound to a bamboo pole. In the dark- 
ness it would not be pleasant to impale one- 
self on a knife at a hopeless distance from an 
adversary. So Jarland merely took pot shots 
at them as they went over the wall. The 
next day they came to him for treatment of 
their wounds. 

The villagers were, of course, defenceless, 
and the pirates, as the French commissioner 
insisted on terming them, were brutes. It is 
never wise to offer opposition to a brute; dumb 
ones excepted. One day I saw four men with 

200 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

the muscular portions of their backs fright- 
fully burned. A handful of roving pirates had 
attacked their village, encountering a stout 
resistance. When the robbers finally subdued 
them, they unsheathed their cavalry sabers, 
relics of the elder von Moltke's army, and 
slashed the backs of the ill-fated countrymen. 
Then they poured kerosene oil into the cuts 
and applied the torch. The victims of this 
barbarous treatment did not die. Three of 
them recovered and went back to the soil. 
The fourth went back to the soil too; but in a 
figurative sense. Losing the use of his arms, 
he went a-begging. 

But it was by no means robbers, robbers, 
all the way. There was much else to divert 
my attention. A sort of bund skirts the lotus 
lake, and here a multitude of merchants thrive, 
their families sprawling on the flagstone road 
in front of the shops. One day, as I was 
walking by, I saw a pretty child of six or 
seven years having her feet bound for the 
first time. I had always imagined that the 
feet were bound from infancy, but later learned 
that the legs are permitted to attain a fair 
strength before being thus outraged. The 
child had started to whimper. No wonder! 
Her little toe was pointing toward her heel. 
It would not reach there for a number of 

201 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

years. But there is nothing hke a strong and 
early start. The httle girl whimpered and 
then her mother, noticing my interest, said to 
her, "Don't cry. There's a foreigner looking 
at you. You don't want him to see you 
cry." Instantly the incipient woman dried her 
tears and smiled through them, though she 
could not help twisting her mouth, for there 
were no slack places in the bandages. 

Why do they do this? I have asked many 
questions in China, and I have tried to answer 
them. The natives can only counter with 
the timeworn phrase, " Yu fa-tzu — it is the 
custom." Or else they give you facetious 
reasons which are more humorous than true. 
On the other hand I suppose it is not alto- 
gether unsignificant that the sages, when they 
devised an ideograph meaning talkativeness or 
loquacity, should have simply written the 
primitive symbol for woman thrice. 

I came near shooting a native farmer once. 
I was out for wild pigeon, and on my way 
back heard an unearthly screaming over a 
kao-liang fence. A man was beating his wife, 
I stood the affair as long as I could before 
jumping the fence and pointing my gun at 
him. I was so indignant that I actually pulled 
one of the triggers. But the shell was empty 
and I had not ejected it. So I merely clubbed 

202 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

him over the shoulders until he desisted. 
"She talks too much," he said. He was quite 
right. Her tongue followed me down the road. 

When the moon came full and the Tibetan 
cranes flapped in solitary grandeur above the 
lesser clouds, the Chinese commenced one of 
their quaintest festivals. Huge yellow cakes 
as large as drumheads were baked and eaten. 
A variety of lesser things, all of them edible, 
banked the shop fronts, so that as I walked 
along I was nearly overcome with rich narcotic 
odors. Little knots of natives stood in the 
open streets, beneath the dimmed blue of the 
sky, gazing wistfully at the yellow moon and 
silently munching their cakes. The mellow 
harvest moon is the giver of all good gifts, for 
in China nothing is so valuable as food. 

But at this particular time nature had 
decreed that the earth should cast a shadow 
on its satellite. Their beloved moon was in 
imminence of being swallowed by the black 
dragon of the skies. So the whole countryside 
banded together and went into the fields, 
armed only with kettles and pots and drums, 
and sticks with which to beat them. All night 
long they clamored noisily. For a few mo- 
ments it actually seemed as though the black 
dragon would accomplish his execrable purpose. 
But in the littler hours of the morning he 

203 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

began to give way. When they saw they had 
him on the run, the farmers beat their kettles 
more vigorously than ever. And as eventually 
they succeeded, they became more convinced 
than ever of their prowess. Thus is supersti- 
tion born. 

My writer's wife who took opium to relieve 
the rack of childbirth died suddenly one morn- 
ing. I went into the home to see what I could 
do. The husband and father was wringing his 
hands in despondency. It was not so much 
sorrow as the spirit of hopelessness that 
dominated his soul. A boy of twelve stood 
staring wide-eyed beside the bier. Two little 
girls prattled noisily on the floor. Three 
native priests occupied the center of the room. 
One beat a drum with monotonous precision. 
Another burnt pieces of paper with words of 
intercession written on them. He lighted the 
second from the first, and so on. The third 
twirled a Tibetan prayer wheel and accom- 
panied the whine of the inter-revolving discs 
with a pagan chant. But the oppression of 
sorrow did not pass from that house. 

I could only place my hand on my writer's 
arm and murmur, "X'o lien, k'o lien — what 
a pity." Then I turned incompetently away. 

I don't know who was at fault, Pak-koi or 
I. Perhaps I should have sought her out in 

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THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

her home near the httle south gate. I must 
confess to having walked often in the quiet 
street and to having Hngered an absurdly long 
while by the big bronze bell. I even went so 
far as to tempt a couple of boys aside with a 
handful of coppers, but Pak-koi signified 
nothing to them. I had been so charmed by 
her that evening in the gardens that I foolishly 
omitted to be pertinent. I had done the same 
thing before in a different way. Often, while 
hunting in the jungle, I happened on flowers 
of extravagant beauty, thinking to claim them 
on my way out. But invariably they evaded a 
second glance. The same is true of thoughts. 
They flit away seldom to return. When they 
do, it is owing to the kindliness of the gods. 
And the gods were kind to me. 

It was the week before Christmas that my 
Chinese clerk announced a man with a personal 
message. The man, a decrepit old fellow of 
exquisite manners, whose faltering limbs gave 
the appearance of obsequiousness, carried the 
message both in his head and on a card in a 
dainty red envelope. The card was for court- 
esy's sake, and a tribute to my understanding 
of the written tongue. The old man put on a 
pair of square-rimmed spectacles and read it 
out to me in a paternal voice. The gist of 
what he read was this: "Li Li Fang begs that 

205 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

the Honorable Sir will deign to adorn her poor 
house on Christmas day. She is not a Chris- 
tian but she thinks many of their customs 
beautiful, and among them none more charm- 
ing than the Christmas tree. Will the Honor- 
able Sir be so good as to lend local color to the 
festivities? The children will adore him and 
have promised not to be frightened. It is at 
four o'clock, but the Honorable Sir may come 
earlier. " 

*'Pak-koi?" I questioned as composedly as 
the occasion warranted. 

"A-a-a-ah, Pak-koi, Pak-koi," returned the 
old man with startling celerity. 

Pak-koi must have been a term of endear- 
ment some one had given her. The sounds 
composing it are distinctly southern Chinese, 
so I have no inkling of its meaning. Con- 
sidering Pak-koi herself, Pak-koi might well 
have been a very lavish adjective. 

I gave the old man a ten-dollar gold piece 
with which to buy sweetmeats and candies for 
the children. It took me nearly twenty 
minutes to press it into his palm. At first he 
thought it a tip of which I did not know the 
value. But in the end his ansemic fingers 
closed over the coin and he tottered into the 
street. 

Three o'clock of Christmas afternoon found 
206 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

the old man waiting outside my door to con- 
duct me to my hostess. In twenty minutes 
we were standing in front of the devil screen 
of a quaint little house in the shadow of a 
Buddhist temple. I presume the bell in the 
quiet street was a sort of outlying sign of 
religiousness. Circumventing the devil screen, 
we entered a tiny courtyard where a bevy of 
little girls were throwing colored paper butter- 
flies into the air and catching them as they 
floated down again. Involuntarily I paused 
to see the sheer beauty of the little women. 
Up and down they danced like a flower garden 
in motion. Then one by one they caught 
sight of me, and the butterflies fluttered down 
unheeded. An older girl sped into the house, 
crying in a voice that rippled, '^^K'o jen lai 
lo — the guest has come." In another moment 
Pak-koi herself was welcoming me. 

It was the first time I had really had a look 
at her. She was garmented in a dark silk of 
which the pattern was a chrysanthemum and 
the color blue. Her coat, a sort of jacket 
and waist combined, was short, though the 
sleeves were long, terminating in peaks that 
ran over her fingers. She was wearing a blue 
skirt of the same material as her coat, only 
over this a black lace overskirt was worn so 
that the color shone through it like wistaria 

207 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

seen through a latticework. Champagne satin 
sHppers, of which only the points were visible, 
adorned her feet. The collar of her coat 
reached nearly to her chin and the effect of 
the blue of the silk, the black of her hair, and 
the rose-tint of her complexion as they mingled 
in the vicinity of her eyes is quite indescribable. 

I don't think I have ever seen a Chinese 
woman with features so pronouncedly Oc- 
cidental as Pak-koi's. Instead of wearing her 
raven hair parted in the middle she wore it 
parted considerably on one side and fluffed up 
on top so that she seemed taller than she 
really was. Her beauty was by no means 
fragile, like that of so many Chinese ladies of 
the better class, but rather immanent as if she 
had never taken thought of her personal ap- 
pearance but radiated loveliness instinctively. 
Her cheeks lay under blue-black eyes like two 
inverted rose petals. Fairer than any jungle 
flower, how nearly I had missed thee! 

The Christmas tree was set on the h'ang^ 
or dais, of the living room. My ten-dollar 
gold piece, transformed into a sugared menag- 
erie, lay on a square piece of yellow silk about 
the base of it^ The branches of the little con- 
ifer supported tiny beggars and tradesmen 
done in clay and dressed like grown-ups; also 
priests with real hairs for whiskers and rosaries 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

of colored glass. There was a storybook for 
every one and an etched silver incense burner 
for me. The children played games not wholly 
unlike our own. When Pak-koi asked me to 
contribute one I suggested Drop the Handker- 
chief, which the little folk seemed to like im- 
mensely. 

Afterwards, with the help of my hostess as 
interpreter, I told them something of the 
meaning of Christmas. And then they all 
ran home in the twilight. 

Besides beautiful silken scrolls representing 
old ancestral wars, the living-room walls were 
hung with pieces of kussa tapestry. The 
floor was partially covered with a gray camel's- 
hair rug with a dragon in blue in the center. 
In a corner, on a rostral-like teak column, 
sat a Buddha in gold. Beneath the beneficent 
repose of the Buddha's eyes were a table and 
two chairs. Here Pak-koi and I sat ourselves 
down, while a serving maid set a porcelain 
teapot and two dainty cups between us. 

"Why is it that I am so content.^" I asked 
her, commencing the conversation. 

"Perhaps it is the peacefulness of Christ- 
mas," she answered, feigning solemnity. 

"No," I said, "it is not that." 

"Then what.^^" she queried, looking up at 
me with rich interest flushing her satiny throat. 

209 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

"It is the feeling that I am akin to you, 
to your people, instead of just a barbarian 
from over the widest sea." 

*'I have not felt that way before, O West- 
erner." 

"Then you, too, are experiencing it, Pak- 
koi.?" 

"I think it because spiritually you and I 
are so childlike. What did the great teacher 
write? 'The child's heart and the man's mind, 
poetry and philosophy: this is God.'" 

The ceiling over our heads was painted in 
blue and gold and purple. The house had 
manifestly once been part of a temple. A 
lantern of multi-colored silks depended from 
one of the painted beams, shedding its soft 
light like a sort of heavenly benediction over 
us. I thought of everything in the world to 
say, but felt that all had been said. The at- 
mosphere of China, like lethe, crept almost 
insidiously into my blood; and we sat there 
like figures in one of the tapestries on the 
wall, she quaintly resigned, and I oppressed 
with the weight of her loveliness. 



210 



CHAPTER XIV 

Ragot, the station master at Pishihchai, 
and I early struck up a friendship. He was 
an inveterate sportsman with a correspond- 
ing imagination. In other ways he was quite 
human. He liked good wines and crisp tobacco. 
Papillon, or Butterfly, attested the connois- 
seur in women. I had many times to thank 
heaven for Papillon. Mengtsz grew unbear- 
able in moments. My home was like a castle 
set on the edge of the world. The days were 
long and the evenings eternity. When I felt 
like drinking myself to death, as a brilliant 
Englishman had done before me, I saddled 
my pony and clattered over to Pishihchai. 
The Flea-Infested-Spot was ugly and sat on 
the bare top of a hill like a wart on a bald- 
headed man's pate. 

But I never tired of Ragot's tales of the hunt. 
And then Papillon was there to serve me, 
always flitting about, ever smiling and never 
provoked; not even when Ragot got stupidly 
drunk and ran about on all fours like a pig. 
On Sunday mornings we took our guns and 

211 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

Ragot's dog and hitched ourselves to the rear 
of the Yunnanfu express. I say hitched our- 
selves, because that is literally what we did. 
Ragot tied a rope to his lorry and passed the 
other end through an iron ring near the coupling 
joint. To keep the lorry from running under 
the coach we planted our feet against the 
edge of the platform. As children we all have 
accomplished something similar when we fas- 
tened our sleds to the back of a pung and then 
slipped the rope when we reached our destina- 
tion. It was a wild ride down the mountain 
side and up the farther hills. Going down, we 
made excessive speed, like a coal train running 
away. Climbing, when the engine made a 
sudden burst, we were nearly pulled from our 
seats. Pateau, the dog, who had done this 
many times before, slumbered between us. 

When we reached a point opposite the hill on 
which we purposed to hunt, Ragot slipped 
the rope. But he had tied an extra large knot 
in the end of it to prevent fraying, and this 
caught in the ring. Against our wills we sped 
merrily on. Some moments elapsed before 
Ragot had the foresight to bend down and 
cautiously pull hand over hand on the rope, 
as one pulls in an anchor. Perhaps he had 
pulled a half of the rope in when the knot 
slipped clear, and he bounded back like a 

212 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

rubber ball, hitting the bench with such force 
that it went over like falling lead. Fortunately 
it had been set at the very front edge of the 
lorry. We hung on to the bench and gravity 
did the rest. When we finally came to a stop 
we looked whitely into each other's eyes. 

"God," said Ragot. It was the English 
word he used oftenest. 

"Ragot, this is no time for profanity," I 
countered. 

''Eh hien," he returned, with an uncom- 
prehending look. 

"Well, we won't pray either," I answered, 
picking up my traps. 

In the village at the foot of the hill Ragot 
sought out a native acquaintance of his who 
had charge of a temple a little higher up. We 
gave our bags and food into the hands of this 
fellow who, while we hunted, was to clean 
the temple and prepare us a meal. Dogs bayed 
us on all sides. Bright-looking children ran 
after us as we strode down the narrow streets. 
Fresh-skinned women hung their heads, think- 
ing thus to gain the approval of their mates who 
kept a stolid demeanor. A few of them cov- 
ertly smiled at me, and then broke into foolish 
laughter when they were safely by. Old women, 
leaning on crooked sticks, stared at us through 
bleared lids. I heard their toothless munching 

213 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

lips mumble ^'Hsi kuo jen — Western men" 
as we passed by. 

The mountain on which we hunted was 
rocky and precipitous, and covered with thick 
brush and the tenacious mountain pine. Ragot 
carried a machete-like knife with which he 
hacked a passage. I had loaded my gun with 
two shells, one for pheasant, the other for 
panther. There was no way of knowing which 
one I should have need of first. Below us 
stretched the plains, the railway cleaving them 
with its glittering steel. 

Finally Pateau put up a golden pheasant. 
It whished off like a shot. Ragot, who had 
been expecting a find, fired on the instant. 
It did not seem possible that he could have 
been quick enough for the bird. But a search 
proved otherwise. The fine shot had almost 
plucked this prettiest bird of the China woods. 
After striking two speckled grouse and a wood- 
cock we came to the top of the mountain. 
Large black bowlders were everywhere in pro- 
fusion. A table of green grazing land lay a 
little to one side. On the edge of it flourished 
a clump of acacia trees. I thought this a likely 
spot for a rest. 

After photographing me holding the golden 
pheasant Ragot turned his attention to the 
rocks. I noticed him watching a large flat 

214 




CHINESE LANDSCAPE FROM A MOUNTAIN TOP 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

bowlder with narrowed eyes, but then Ragot 
was always narrowing his eyes. It was not 
until he grasped me tightly by the arm and 
drew me beside him that I recovered my usual 
faculties. 

"Can you make him out?" he asked. 

"Make what out.^^" I returned softly. 

"i^ tigre,'^ he whispered, between nearly 
closed lips. 

"There are no tigers here," I replied anx- 
iously. 

" Une panthere done," he answered, with a 
gesture of impatience. 

"A panther!" I ejaculated, raking the top 
of the bowlder with my eyes. 

"Watch carefully now," cautioned Ragot, as 
he sighted, resting on the crook of his left arm. 

I could make nothing out but the irregular 
top of the rock until the roar of the shotgun 
burst on my ears. In the same instant I saw 
a lithe form whip into the air, and bound with 
a whining shriek over the brink of the moun- 
tain. I had barely been able to make out a red 
streak between the panther's ears. It all flashed 
before me like a cinematograph exposure. 

Ragot was cursing softly in liquid French. 

"You grazed him," I proffered. 

But still the French flowed in voluble pro- 
fusion. After a little, when the air was cleared 

215 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

of smoke and language, we made our way 
down to the temple. Our man was there. 
He had laid out a white table cover in front 
of the sitting gods. A quart of pinard stood 
like a beacon of hope beside each plate. The 
gods looked down on us disdainfully as we 
ate. Not so the rabble which hovered out- 
side the door. It is pleasant to watch humans 
enjoy food that ordinarily one would throw to 
dogs. We had brought a prodigality of food 
and we carried none back. Friendship is an 
elastic principle to be nourished in devious 
ways. This village became our friend. 

Our ponies had been led out to us, so we 
rode them back, leaving the lorry to be picked 
up by a returning freight. About halfway 
back to Pishihchai a herd of wild ponies got 
wind of us and came racing up, to attack, as 
we thought, our stallions. But the beautiful 
beasts were only evincing curiosity. One of 
them did come near my dappled gray as if to 
bite him. I drew my revolver, prepared for 
the worst, for it would never do to be thrown 
among them. There was much snorting and 
rearing, and I had to thank heaven I was 
hard to the saddle. In the end they dashed 
off the way they had come, leaving us envious 
of their speed. 

Some eight miles to the north of Pishihchai 
216 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

we entered the Valley of The Fragrant Springs. 
It was an oval plot of green surrounded by 
wooded hills, with occasional abandoned tem- 
ples spotting the slopes with their green and 
yellow roofs. A stream ran through the cen- 
ter of the valley, being the only sign of move- 
ment visible. A fleckless sky overarched the 
hills and I felt like Rasselas, though at the 
moment I doubted if I should ever want to 
escape, so utterly entrancing was this per- 
fect cameo of nature. 

I had noticed Ragot sweeping the verdant 
amphitheater with his binoculars, but thought 
nothing particular of it until I hear him ex- 
claim with suppressed excitement, ^'Nom de 
Dieu, elles sont venues." 

"Who are come.'^" I questioned, dropping 
into the idiom of his tongue. 

''Les femmes steriles,'^ he replied, his power- 
ful frame a-quiver. 

"Barren women!" I cried, following the 
line of his glasses with popping eyes. 

''Mais oui,"" he returned. "They come 
down from the hills each year during the Fes- 
tival to bare their bosoms to the moon. I 
am ignorant of the result. Only I know men 
are not allowed." 

"You mean to say no men accompany 
them.?^" 

217 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

"Just that." 

"And how long do they stay?" 

"Oh, from one new moon to the next. The 
real transformation takes place between moons 
in the dark. When they return to the vil- 
lages they are nearly savage, and their hus- 
bands have been known to flee them." 

"Do we pass near them.''" I questioned, 
involuntarily loosening my pistol in its holster. 

"Do we pass near them! Nom de Dieu^ 
we stay to watch. You are not afraid.''" 

"Watch what.''" I queried, ignoring the 
latter thrust. 

"The Moon Dance," Ragot replied, slip- 
ping down from his pony and unfastening 
a blanket from the pommel. 

"It is two hours to dark," he went on. "We 
had best not ride farther into the valley. We 
don't want them to see us. When the moon 
gets up we'll lead the ponies to the edge of 
the wood; then we can make our way up the 
hill on foot." 

There was something so altogether wild and 
fantastic in the idea that I did not see how 
Ragot could take it so lightly. Nor did he 
sleep. He merely rolled his blanket into a 
pillow and lay on his back, his eyes wide open 
and staring into the ever deepening blue. 
For want of a better occupation I put fresh 

218 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

cartridges in my pistol. "Wild horses in the 
afternoon, wild women in the evening! What 
next?" I thought, reaching for Ragot's binoc- 
ulars with my unemployed hand. 

The sun sought Burma in a flare of red, and 
night ran down from the Yunnan steppes 
like a river of shadow. Stars appeared by 
twos and threes until the sky was a jeweled 
firmament. After a little I saw a red glow 
steal over the crest of the hills. A crimson 
indeterminate rim pushed over the edge of 
the darkness, and then the jungle moon poured 
up till it stood clear of the night. Like a molten 
disc it burned, mounting ever upwards, the 
crimson merging into red, the red finally into 
yellow, until it became the familiar mellow 
moon of New England harvest time. I stood 
like one bewitched, when Ragot plucked my 
arm. "Come," he said simply. 

We led our ponies along the shadow of the 
wood, stopping at a point just below the tem- 
ple roofs. Picketing the tired beasts to sapling 
pines we crept upward like scouts of an 
ari:ny. It needed only five minutes to gain 
the temple walls. For a moment our breath- 
ing engaged our ears. Then a shuflBing sound 
broke on us through the stillness of the wood, 
followed by cries like the chant of samurai 
warriors. 

219 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

I turned to look for Ragot and found him 
climbing a tree. Instinctively I did the same, 
not dreaming what this vantage-point would 
disclose. Turning my back against the trunk 
I looked into the temple courtyard, and for 
the second (or was it thousandth .f*) time my 
soul was in my eyes. 

Perhaps twenty women wearing only demi- 
skirts, barefooted, with their raven tresses 
falling to naked shoulders, moved in rhythmic 
progress over the flagstone floor. Some were 
undeniably young, eighteen or twenty from 
their looks, whose willowy bodies rippled milk- 
white in the moonlight. Others were mani- 
festly women of ripened years, for their forms 
were no longer like the clay of an hour's work- 
ing. Their breasts stood out firm and bold, 
while their waists curved outward into hips of 
daring, though not undelicate, strength. Then 
there were women nearly old, flat-breasted and 
bent, whose ungraceful movements simulated 
Salem witches in their heyday. 

But all of them, young and old, seemed 
caught in the grasp of some extravagant power. 
Every now and then they paused in the dance 
and bared their untried breasts to the mounting 
moon, striking their bosoms with their open 
hands, and chanting those wild mysterious 
cries that, though harsh and raucous to my 

220 




NEAR THE VALLEY OF FRAGRANT SPRINGS 




SHRINE IN THE VALLEY OF FRAGRANT SPRINGS 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

Western ears, were not without an element of 
music. 

"I'd give a fortune for this picture," I 
whispered across to Ragot. 

"You wouldn't live to enjoy it," he crypto- 
graphically answered. 

"You don't mean — " I began. 

"But I do," he said, laying his fingers to his 
lips with an ominous "Sh." 

We watched them for upwards of an hour 
before they began to tire. First the very old 
ones drooped away, and then the very young, 
leaving the most virile to continue the dance 
alone. Knowing that childless foreign women 
worshipped the little mud gods of Fertility I 
could not be surprised at the superstition of 
these paragons from the hills. We clambered 
down from our perches in the trees with all the 
reluctance of persons getting out of bed on a 
frosty morning. Like men surfeited with rich 
food we saddled the ponies, asleep where they 
stood, and rode out of the Valley of The 
Fragrant Springs, back to Pishihchai. 

When the railway was building, Pishihchai 
was not the deserted flea-infested spot that 
it is now. Money flowed freely, and men's 
lives were only worth the cracks of pistols that 
snuffed them out. Ragot told me one tale that 
will bear repeating. An Italian and a Greek 

221 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

got into a gambling feud. Night after night 
they sat at the table and played, an admiring 
circle of comrades looking on. The game was 
poker. On a Saturday night the Italian got 
up from his chair with six thousand silver 
dollars in his bags. The Greek got up with his 
hands in his jeans. Each one grasped a stick 
of dynamite. That night when the Italian was 
dreaming of villas and dark-eyed maidens, the 
Greek crept into his house and planted the 
dynamite under the bed. He did not, how- 
ever, omit to remove the bags of silver. The 
rest of the story is inevitable. The Greeks al- 
ways had a genius for tragedy. 

When the rainy season set in, I was con- 
stantly on the watch for trains sliding into the 
valley. Ninety-one is the name of a famous 
viaduct on the line. It was known to have 
been weakened by rains of the previous year. 
But the French administration was unwilling to 
pour cheap gold into expensive silver. So 
Ninety-one gradually crumpled, till one clear 
night, when the moon had broken through wet 
clouds and driven them over the rim of the 
hills, it gave completely away. Coincidence 
will never cease to engage men's minds. The 
last straw was the midnight freight. It might 
have gotten over safely had not the bowels of 
the earth rumbled just then. I felt my bed 

222 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

rocking and dashed onto the veranda in time 
to hear a sliding roar as Ninety-one and the 
ill-fated freight jangled into the plains. 

"Thank heaven there were only natives 
aboard," said a French lady the next afternoon 
at tea. I could only murmur assent to this, 
though the natives' lives were undoubtedly as 
valuable as our own. But not in our opinions. 
What would man do if he were totally depend- 
ent on man? 

Raymond Racine, fine gentleman and friend, 
was the heart of the Mengtsz colony. He 
was a philosopher whose meditations he once 
summed up for me in the following words. He 
chose them with the nice discrimination of a 
French savant. 

*'I am like a man part way up a ladder," 
he said. "I have no knowledge how I came so 
far. I do not even know if I have come far. 
I look neither up nor down. I merely keep my 
feet firmly on the rung and look about me. Je 
regarde surtout la vie. Above all I watch life." 

Not far from Racine's home was the Red 
Pagoda, the most distinctly oriental touch to 
the Mengtsz landscape. A former colleague 
used it as a summer sleeping-house until he 
heard that the natives were growling against 
what they considered desecration of a holy 
place. It was deserted when I climbed the 

223 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

swaying bamboo ladder to the upper floor and 
looked out on vistas of banana trees, over the 
lotus lake and away to the farther hills. But 
once it had held the attention of the country- 
side and its fame is said to have reached as far 
as Peking. 

In the olden days, when the local lord was 
virtually an emperor, he became enamored of 
one of the native princesses from the hills. 
She already had plighted her troth secretly to 
another, but her father turned deaf ears on her 
implorings and gave her to the ruler of the 
plains. Her hill lover followed her into the 
city and there obtained a minor position in 
the government, but such a one as permitted 
him occasional meetings with his beloved. 
Spurning the caresses of her Mengtsz lord she 
sought only those of her lover from the hills. 

But in time they were discovered, and the 
jealous and enraged ruler imprisoned her in the 
Red Pagoda and publicly executed her lover in 
the square opposite. After the execution he 
went haughtily to see if now she would receive 
him with caresses. But he found her spirit 
flown, united in death as in life with her lover 
from the hills. 

The early winter season of 1919 had been 
especially dry. But I did not imagine the 

224 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

cobalt lake would seek the bowels of the earth 
for that reason. About Mengtsz there had 
always been a superstition of the Unknown 
River that led to the Everlasting Fires where 
the devils abode. I knew that periodically, 
when the lower regions got too hot, the Dark 
One Himself sucked water down to dim his 
unquenchable flames. In my mind the entire 
affair was only a picturesque story until the 
cobalt lake dwindled to a mere stream trickling 
out of a cavernous hole as wine drips from a 
barrel. 

One of my outdoor men, who had been years 
in the district, had witnessed the sight before 
but he had not gone in. He could get nobody 
to go with him. When I mentioned the matter 
he remembered his old enthusiasm and pro- 
posed that we should go in together. The 
entire native population of Pishihchai gathered 
in the marketplace to wonder at our rashness. 
Children whimpered behind their mothers' 
trousers. The very dogs stopped barking, 
as if they too would fain have had us stay. 
Old men shook their heads incredulously. This 
boded evil for everyone. For one morning the 
lake was gone; the next it was there again. It 
was emptied and filled with the speed of 
light. Who were we to mock the power of 
devils? 

225 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

"There's only one danger," said Listrom, my 
outdoor man, "and that's that the river will 
catch us inside." 

" 'Tis our chance," I returned, as we made 
our way cautiously down. 

The bed of the lake was like a giant amphi- 
theatre; not muddy, but of the red gravelly 
soil of the hills. It was as if a monstrous shell 
had been detonated there, and the rains had 
filtered down to form a little stream. When we 
got to the bottom and looked up, we could see 
only the sky above us. It was worth while to 
have gone down just for this. The blue was 
deep, like the color of Chinese wistaria. 

I was surprised that no fish were lying about. 
The lake abounded in carp and commoner 
kinds. In the stream a few minnows darted 
at our shadows. Probably the bigger ones had 
gone down to propitiate the gods of the dark- 
ness. I knew that after a drought fishing was 
abandoned. Thus was another superstition 
born. 

The mouth of the cavern stood straight up 
like a horseshoe. It was black inside, but 
strangely enough, when we got in, we could see 
without the aid of a torch. The floor was com- 
posed of terraced rock, once slippery, but now 
fairly dry, and carpeted with a mossy fungus 
on which our boots fell noiselessly. The floor 

226 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

of the cavern led up a little way, and then it 
took a tunnel-like downward course. 

I had been so concerned with watching my 
feet, for we had to be mindful of crevices, that 
I did not at first notice the source of the 
cavern's illumination. Choosing a shelving to 
sit on, I looked up at strangely illumined icicles 
that shed an unsteady glow, like coals on a 
hearth. They were manifestly phosphorescent 
in their nature. For a moment one shone 
like a frosted candle; then the light went out. 
Large bats, like little devils, flitted among 
them. At times they clung to them, as moths 
cling to a lamp. The sight of the bats reas- 
sured me. If they lived in there, the water 
could not fill the cavern after all. I did not 
think of egress through the top. 

By seven o'clock we had gone in perhaps a 
half a mile, when Listrom suggested that we 
camp for the night. Selecting an especially soft 
terrace we settled down, ate a portion of our 
food, and prepared our couches. We had along 
food for seven days. We expected to be gone 
only three. After that time we were to be 
searched for. 

I was fast asleep when Listrom pinched me 
on the arm. Nor did he desist. I sat up, and 
still he was pinching me. First I looked at my 
arm which was wet with blood where his nails 

227 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

bit in. Then I looked at Listrom. My eyes 
and arm only were awake. The rest of my 
faculties still slept. 

Shall I ever forget Listrom's face.^^ To write 
that I saw fear stamped in every feature would 
be to intimate that I saw nothing else. But I 
saw much else. I saw a doomed man facing 
torture. I saw him standing beside the rack, 
mounting the gallows, laying his head on the 
block. I saw his dilated nostrils that did not 
grow small again. I saw staring eyes that did 
not blink. I saw his customarily wine-red 
cheeks gone white like my lime-washed walls. 
I saw, — and then I heard. 

I heard a sound coming from afar. It was a 
smooth sound like the lap and suck of waves. 
It rose and fell, rose and fell, beating the wind- 
less warmth into a current of audible eddies. 
It whished like the wind, whined like hail, and 
soughed like rubbing limbs. 

I jerked Listrom to his feet. His fear had 
rendered me sensible. Abandoning everything 
but my gun, I pulled him after me. I had 
thrust his weapon into his trembling hands. 
They closed on it as a drowning man's fingers 
close on the throat of his rescuer. 

Upwards we slipped and ran. While running 
terror made our senses dead. It was only when 
we fell that the gently increasing sound reached 

228 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

after us. It seemed to run visibly along the 
walls as wind waves down a field of corn. The 
gleaming stalactites barred our flight like in- 
verted flames. On, on we slipped and ran, ran 
and slipped, with that haunting, horrifying, 
beautiful sound enveloping us like a symphony 
of death. 

We were near the top of the rise. The de- 
pending stalactites seemed to pierce the floor, 
like molten fingers. Then they lifted, lifted. 
We were nearly up. Then Listrom went down 
with a twisted knee. I bent over him, implor- 
ingly. But he would not go on. I started. I 
could feel the air now beating against my face 
with little forceful puffs. The sound rose like a 
forced draft. It did everything but roar. It 
pulsed with inconceivable energy. 

I lifted Listrom across my thighs, dragging 
him to the top. There I rested an instant 
before starting down, down to light and life. 
But scarcely had I taken a dozen steps before I 
staggered against the oncoming air. I felt 
myself being beaten down. I fell, Listrom 
falling across me. I took a deep breath and 
closed my lips tightly. I made myself taut for 
the blow. 

It came and I felt like one being hammered 
against a rock. My breath went from me with 
a gasp. I swallowed and then I breathed again. 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

I shut my eyes and lay still. But the water 
did not come. The wind passed and the sound 
vanished like a cloud. 

I got up and dragged Listrom to the mouth 
of the cavern. I stepped out and looked up. 
The sky was blackened with birds. It was 
morning but the sun was hid. 

Twelve hours later the cobalt lake shone 
again in its exquisite blue. 



230 



CHAPTER XV 

Racine's going was a sort of prelude to my 
own departure. I knew the Ides of March 
were fast approaching, that the big Empress 
then would bear me to my own shores. But 
before Racine went he married his lady from 
Japan. He considered it the only proper 
thing to do. She had served him faithfully 
for nearly thirty years. He could not abandon 
her now. And though we knew disappoint- 
ment awaited him when he came to France, 
we hadn't the hearts to counsel him otherwise. 

They were married in the French consulate 
that lay just over the wall from me. The 
women of the port, three in number, all were 
there. The children came too, and because of 
the extravagant nature of the occasion were 
permitted a glass of champagne just like the 
grown-ups. We toasted Raymond Racine, 
bachelor gentleman, for the last time, and then 
we all crowded into the little room where 
Flayelle, the squinting consul, in blue with 
yellow braid, and a cocked admiral's hat, 
married them. 

231 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

"Do you take this man to be your wedded 
wife?" demanded old Flayelle, boring the 
little lady through and through with his one 
eye. 

We laughed uproariously and bantered the 
old consul for his mistake. But he went 
imperturbably on to the end. Then Racine 
kissed her, the consul mopped his brow with a 
crested handkerchief, and we all went out for 
another toast. "Vive Racine, vive la madame, 
vive la France!^' 

In the evening we assembled in the dining 
room of Fortin's hotel. When the railway was 
building it had been the stage for many a wild 
festivity, and brave men's blood had stained 
its knotty boards. We had a decrepit Pathe 
phonograph and the national anthems of 
Greece, Italy and France. To these we danced. 
After we danced we toasted Madame Racine. 
The gracious Raymond had mounted a billiard 
table to make a speech. But emotion over- 
came him. So he danced one of his fanciful 
Algerian figures until our cheeks were wet 
with champagne tears of mirth. 

"I cannot imagine that I am leaving this 
place forever," he said, turning beyond the 
lotus lake to look for the last time on the Red 
Pagoda and beside it the little white bungalow 
that had been his home for twelve long years. 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

We put him on the train and watched him, 
wet-eyed, into the distance. So vanished Ray- 
mond Racine. 

Pere Goudot, who had been thirty-six years 
among the tribes and who got twenty-eight 
dollars a year for his services, drifted down 
from the hills one day and looked on a white 
man for the first time in seven years. He 
had a fine sensitive face with thin quivering 
lips that affected me like other people's tears. 
I asked him many questions about the natives 
in the hills. 

"Why don't you go back with me for a 
couple of days.f^" he asked. He spoke French 
with a slight hesitation, as if he were not sure 
of his grammar. He had not spoken it during 
those seven years. 

As I was soon to leave the district I ac- 
cepted his invitation with alacrity. On a 
Tuesday morning while the settlement was yet 
abed, we mounted the eastern rim of the 
mountain until we touched a tableland. From 
here we rode twelve miles northeast, pass- 
ing many native villages, some of them mani- 
festly harboring nearly savage folk, and others 
like the towns of the Chihli plains. On four 
o'clock of a Wednesday afternoon we came 
to Hsi-kai where Pere Goudot had fourteen 
hundred converts. 

233 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

The people Pere Goudot ruled with an 
ecclesiastical judiciousness were one of the 
numerous Miao tribes of whom I had heard 
much but seen little. Occasionally they wan- 
dered into Mengtsz to barter beaded garments 
in exchange for iron implements. Their women 
were noted for their complexions and for their 
eyes, which last were not utterly black like 
those of the average Chinese, but slightly 
pigmented with brown. Nor were their faces 
so flat nor their noses so spatulate. Their men 
excelled in archery and their women in weav- 
ing. Their little girls did not wear lily feet; 
on the contrary the Miaos struck me as being 
super-natural. 

They were interested in any friend of Pere 
Goudot's, and they showed this by plying me 
with innumerable pertinent questions. Was I 
married .f^ What was my age? How much 
salary did I receive.'^ Did the color in my eyes 
burn? How many sons did I want? If I had 
six, what would I do with them? And so on, 
until Pere Goudot came and rescued me. 

The French Father told me he had been 
with this tribe twelve years when, one day, he 
conceived the notion of photographing some of 
the chief er patriarchs. But he was unable to 
accomplish this because he could not explain 
to their satisfaction how it was possible to get 

234 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

their likenesses into the Httle black box without 
transferring also a part of their souls. The 
Miao chiefs preferred to remain spiritually- 
intact. 

It piqued the priest to think that with all 
his advantages of mind and knowledge he was 
still unable to meet this childish argument. 
He told me that three more years passed before 
he met their objection. One evening, while 
turning over affectionately the picture of his 
old mother and father, he found himself nearly 
inexplicably saying, "Fancy me destroying 
your souls, ma mere et mon pere, just to obtain 
your pictures." And then in a flash the light 
burst on him. 

He carried the picture to the chief men of 
the tribe, and said, "Can you imagine me, 
your spiritual mediator and good friend, being 
so unfilial as to destroy the souls of my mother 
and my father .f*" 

The chiefs deliberated among themselves for 
a moment. Then, without further ado, they 
went about making preparations for the pic- 
ture. The spiritual content of Pere Goudot's 
argument had won them. 

On the morning of the second day an Indian 
fakir from Khasgar wandered into the village. 
It seems he had a reputation for adroitness. 
But neither Pere Goudot nor I paid him 

235 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

attention until we saw some children with a 
colored poster in their hands. I was curious 
and went forward to see what the drawing 
was. It represented the fakir sitting within a 
ring of fires watching a little boy seated on a 
coil of rope. "Can it be the famous rope 
trick.f^" I murmured half aloud. 

I told Pere Goudot what I thought it meant 
and he suggested that we go down to the 
market place that evening. 

Five or six hundred people must have been 
there, but we saw no sign of the fakir. The 
Miaos made way for the priest and me, letting 
us through to the very center of the throng. A 
circular place had been marked ojff with little 
stones, and inside these were a number of 
small braziers set in a circle. In the midst of 
these last a rope lay coiled on a red and blue 
carpet. Beside the carpet I saw a tiny black 
lacquer seat. 

We must have waited an hour before the 
murmur of the throng rose to an excited pitch. 
I had contented myself with watching the 
colorful scene around me. The women were 
adorned in their brightest clothes. The square 
little beaded handkerchief-like hats with silver 
bells on the corners made them look fantastic. 
The weight of the bells keeps the handkerchief 
hat from blowing away. The children looked 

236 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

like veritable flower gardens on the march. 
What mauves there were! And pinks, and 
greens! They were like a race of Martians 
dropped from the sky. And yet I felt strangely 
akin to them. We experienced at least one 
emotion in common: that induced by the 
excitement of waiting for the fakir. 

Finally he came, clothed like a Persian 
prince. He was leading an Indian child of five 
years by the hand. The child cowered before 
the sea of staring eyes. The fakir lifted the 
child and placed him squarely on the coil of 
rope, his legs folded under him, his hands with 
the palms turned upwards, one on the other. 
Then the fakir drew a glowing torch from the 
folds of his gown, blew on it until it burst into 
flame, and lighted the braziers. 

A fairy blue smoke curled lazily out, seeming 
to fall upwards. For a moment the incense 
burned like jets of oil. And then the smoke 
expanded into clouds that nearly obscured the 
little boy on the fanciful carpet. I could 
barely make him out like a blot through the 
blue. The fakir had taken up his seat on the 
lacquer bench. The delicious incense made 
our senses swim. 

The next thing I knew the fakir was chant- 
ing in a low monotonous voice, rocking back- 
ward and forward, his arms crossed over his 

237 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

breast, and his face turned heavenwards. He 
must have kept this up for fifteen minutes 
before I noticed with a start that the blot of 
blue had traveled a perceptible way into the 
air. Were my eyes deceiving me.'^ No. I saw 
the child distinctly lifted on the end of the 
rope, the latter uncoiling itself upward like a 
curious serpent. 

Up, up, the child went. The braziers 
belched their purple smoke with redoubled 
energy. I sat in the midst of a purple mist, 
seeing and feeling purple. The rope went up 
with graceful insinuations, the child barely 
swaying on the end of it. 

Pere Goudot looked at me and I at him. 
But we said nothing. We were speechless with 
amazement. The Miaos were speechless too. 
Not a sound was heard but the moaning voice 
of the fakir. But I felt the intensity of the 
moment. The great crowd was on the point 
of screeching. But fascination took away its 
breath. 

I saw that child disappear in a cloud of 
purple smoke that lay over the spot like a 
blanket. The other end of the rope was 
barely dangling on the earth. It dangled for a 
instant, and then, the fakir reversing his 
intonation, it came down again. I watched it 
coiling itself again as a hawser coils off a 

^38 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

wench. It came down rapidly until the 
upper end disengaged itself from the purple 
smoke. 

The upper end disengaged itself from the 
purple smoke but it no longer supported the 
child. Down, down it came until it reached a 
point some five feet from the ground. And 
there it paused, swaying as a cobra sways 
when music charms its ears. I looked up, 
trying to penetrate the purple mist above me. 
It was like an opaque sheet of blue water. 
Was the child there .^^ What had become of 
him.f^ 

Suddenly the rope slipped down and lay 
motionless where it had lain before. The 
fakir gradually ceased rocking. Slowly his 
voice died away to a whisper and then went 
out altogether. The braziers no longer emitted 
their purple clouds, though their incense lin- 
gered in my nostrils. The mist quietly cleared 
away, revealing the starry sky above. That 
night Pere Goudot and I and all the Miaos 
sought our couches with troubled dreams. 

"You think that woman beautiful.'^" Pere 
Goudot asked of me the following morning. 

There was scarcely need for me to answer 
him. Admiration was written plainly on my 
features. The person occasioning it was a 
Miao woman of perhaps twenty years. She 

^39 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

was drawing water from the village well. She 
balanced the jar on her head, her arms akimbo, 
and walked gracefully within ten feet of us. 
She was beautiful. She had that matchless 
olive complexion so prized by the women of 
Spain. Dark brown eyes and blue-black hair 
with limbs that seemed to flow completed the 
picture. 

"Then you have not see Lena.'*" the priest 
continued, with a look of incomprehension. I 
looked at him blankly, so he went on. 

"I married her to one of your Pishihchai 
outdoor men. What was his name? Listrom?" 

"Not Listrom!" I replied astoundedly. 

"Yes, that's the name, — ^Listrom. Lena's 
father is among the wealthiest native princes. 
Did Listrom choose, he could become a 
Nabob." 

"Listrom married to a princess! Listrom a 
Nabob!" I addressed these ejaculations to no 
one in particular, but Pere Goudot heard 
them. I had always looked kindly on Listrom, 
and especially since our nearly fateful adven- 
ture in the cave. I knew, too, that he had 
married a native woman. But I thought 
nothing of that. More responsible men than 
Listrom had acted similarly. But that he 
should have captured a princess! My respect 
for him advanced in leaps and bounds. 

240 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

On the morning of the third day I bade 
Pere Goudot a tender farewell. Indubitably 
our paths would never cross again. But I had 
to leave him. For in ten days I was to quit 
Mengtsz, perhaps forever. And during those 
ten days, among other things, I had business 
with Listrom. 

I did not know that there was a little lad of 
twelve, the offspring of the French engineer 
who had an eye for beauty when the railway 
was building. The child was named for his 
father, George. And Listrom, as a part of the 
marriage contract, had agreed that the lad 
should receive an education commensurate 
with his birth. The boy's features were un- 
deniably French, but he had his mother's, 
Lena's, eyes and her complexion and her hair, 
and her beautiful radiant spirit which I was 
privileged to glimpse intimately by and by. 

George had been six years in the Xavier 
school at Hanoi. He had completed the 
courses there and was ready for something 
higher. When I got back Listrom told me his 
story and wanted to know if I could be 
bothered taking the little fellow to Shanghai. I 
said I must first see George. To see George 
was to see Lena, and I was fain to look on a 
princess once again. 

To see George was to love him. Lena met 
241 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

me with tremulous downcast eyes. Though it 
was not her custom, she took my right hand 
in her two hands and pressed it with unabashed 
tenderness. She was not unmindful of the 
favor I had to bestow. The moment I saw 
them, I turned and' smiled to Listrom, convey- 
ing my assent to his proposition with my eyes. 

Lena was wearing a cloak of old rose when 
she came down the walk to meet me, leading 
George by the hand. There was something 
heavenly about her face, as there is about the 
faces of Angelo's children. As I reminded 
myself of her story, I thought of one of 
Barrie's felicitous phrasings, — "The finest thing 
in the world is that a woman can pass through 
anything and remain pure." Lena exemplified 
the truth of this as no one else I have ever 
known. 

Finally the last morning came. I rose early 
and walked around my gardens with unfeigned 
emotion. Had it been a wet dreary day I 
might have been consoled. But I was at a 
loss how I should live separated from this 
exquisite beauty of nature. The red moun- 
tains gleamed through the eucalyptus trees. 
The warm air pulsed on my cheek like the 
touch of loving fingers. 

My servants fired off crackers as I went 
down the path for the last time. They trailed 

242 




CLOAREC, LENA, AND THE AUTHOR, WITH MIMI, CLOAREC's DOG 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

after me like children after a bear man. 
People lined the edge of the lotus lake and did 
me a final obeisance. Soldiers presented arms 
and I felt like a -king. I smiled at them, 
through wet eyes, then clasped my hands, 
raising them to my breast as a parting saluta- 
tion. Like Racine I turned to look at the Red 
Pagoda, flaring above the lotus leaves. Then 
I passed around the gray walls of Mengtsz 
city and came to the little depot. - 

My Chinese staff was there, standing silently 
apart from my foreign friends. I shook each 
one by the hand, and then we shook our own. 
Suzanne, my little French sweetheart of twelve 
years, I embraced in her own fashion. Cloarec 
and I walked apart for a moment, saying 
never a word. Should we meet again? The 
little train rumbled in. I stood on the rear 
platform, trying to stem the tears. Mengtsz 
and the beloved moving forms, with white 
specks fluttering over them, faded into an 
indistinguishable gray. 

At Pishihchai, Ragot and Listrom were 
awaiting me with champagne and sweetened 
cakes. Lena and one of her native maids were 
to accompany us to the border of the jungle. 
So the leave-taking would be utterly manly. 

The jungle train tumbled down from the 
Tibetan steppes, panted as if to regain its 

243 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

breath, and was off again. I watched Pishih- 
chai until the red tiled roof of the station 
burned like a ruby in the morning sun. I 
could visualize Ragot and Listrom standing 
there. Their trinity was broken forever. 

At Yenbai, where the jungle begins, Lena 
bade George farewell. I had imagined them 
kissing each other until I remembered that 
Chinese do not kiss. She merely laid her hand 
against his cheek, feeling of his beautiful skin, 
so soft and roseate, like her own. No tears 
glistened in her eyes. They simply opened 
wide and would have been staring, had not 
they been limpid instead. 

Lena got down, attended by her maid, who 
was only a shade less handsome than she, and 
stood in the middle of the track with the 
feather palms forming a canopy over her 
head. I took George to the rear platform as 
the train pulled slowly out. He leaned against 
the railing, looking at her with astonishment, 
trembling with the new emotion risen within 
him. He had never parted from anyone he 
loved before. As a child he had not known 
sorrow. Long after a curve in the roadbed 
shut them from view, he stood looking into 
the distance. A little later, when we were 
settled in our seats, I noticed two trickling 
tears. 



THE CHARM OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM 

"Why do you weep?" I asked him simply. 

'Tour ma mere,'' he said, cuddKng against 
my arm. 

This time we went through the Baie d'Along 
in darkness, coasting up to Hongkong in a 
choppy sea. There the big Empress awaited 
us with its palatial grandeur. At Shanghai, in 
the Yellow Sea, I delivered George into the 
hands of friends of his foster father. The 
Empress slid out of the turgid waters toward 
Japan. In the morning I thought I saw a line 
of yellow mist at the end of the wake. But in 
a moment it had vanished, and with it the 
celestial glory of the Middle Kingdom. The 
waves once more curled with limpid greenness 
and I walked to the bow, feeling a ship's 
length nearer home. 



245 



